Nutanix announces Project Beacon. Under this heading, the HCI specialist wants to develop a manufacturer-independent architecture for applications so that developers can easily move apps between cloud environments.

At its .Next conference, Nutanix will showcase Project Beacon. That’s the name of an ambitious multi-year project that aims to break down the walls between diverse hybrid multicloud environments. Project Beacon must completely separate applications and data from the underlying infrastructure.

Today you can already build applications that run in any cloud environment and on-premises by opting for the same underlying architecture on the hardware. Red Hat offers such a solution with OpenStack and OpenShift, for example. Nutanix wants to go one step further and ensure that applications can be built directly for cloud environments such as those of AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google without being tied to a specific provider.

containers and data

Kubernetes is at the heart of Nutanix’s plan. Containers are building blocks that actually offer almost unlimited portability of applications. Nutanix adds centralized management through a single API and console, allowing organizations to manage diverse cloud environments from one management environment.

A second important pillar is data. Databases are the basis of all applications. That’s why Nutanix also wants to make databases cloud-agnostic. A first step is to bring Nutanix Database Services to the public cloud as a native managed service.

After databases, it’s the turn of other data-centric services. Nutanix thinks streaming, caching and searching. Ultimately, all components of a modern application must be natively available as basic building blocks across the entire hybrid multicloud environment without the need for an additional intermediate layer. This allows you to benefit from the advantages of a cloud provider’s native services without your app losing mobility.

licenses

Uniform building blocks and a uniform and central administration are not enough. Licenses must also be transferrable so there are no legal barriers to moving an application from one cloud provider to another. Nutanix also notes the importance of simplicity when migrating applications.

Of course, the problem of data exfiltration remains: if public cloud providers continue to charge heavily to remove large databases from their cloud environment, there remains a barrier that no technical solution can withstand.

long-term plan

Project Beacon is a long-term goal. Nutanix wants to become some kind of meta HCI farmer. In the classic HCI infrastructure, the higher-level platform already ensures that developers do not have to worry too much about the underlying hardware. It can be scaled and combined as required. Nutanix goes further today by supporting HCI across the private and public multicloud through a unified platform.

Project Beacon goes one step further: In the future, it should be just as irrelevant for the developer which cloud an app runs in as it is already irrelevant which hardware boxes support an HCI environment.