Nutanix Weekly: How a Complete and Open Kubernetes Platform Can Future-Proof Your Business

As Kubernetes® continues to reign as the worldwide container orchestration system of choice, many organizations and independent software vendors (ISVs) are realizing that its capabilities could be an essential key to ongoing and future business success.

Blog: https://www.nutanix.com/blog/how-a-complete-and-open-kubernetes-platform-can-future-proof-your-business by Dan Ciruli

Host: Phil Sellers, XenTegra

Co-Host: Jirah Cox, Nutanix

Co-Host: Andy Greene, XenTegra

Co-Host: Chris Calhoun, XenTegra

Transcript

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Philip Sellers: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Nutanix Weekly, one of the many podcasts that here at XenTegra, we like to call it Content with Context, and that's because we go on the internet and find the best content, and we try to bring our real-world experiences to it.

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Philip Sellers: So, this week on Nutanix Weekly, we're going to be talking about, a topic for future-proofing your business. And, I think that's a timely topic that applies to every business.

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Philip Sellers: And, you know, as with every podcast, I'm joined with a few different, panelists, and, happy to have friends on the podcast with me. I'm Phil Sellers, I'm the Practice Director for Modern Data Center here at XenTegra.

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Philip Sellers: And I'm joined with Jirah Cox, an architect for Nutanix, long-time Guest of this podcast,

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Philip Sellers: kind of our guiding light, maybe?

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Philip Sellers: He's the man, the myth, the legend. Jirah, how are you, man?

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Jirah Cox: Good, Phil, thanks for having me. I like to think that I future-proof this podcast.

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Philip Sellers: Hey, yeah, there we go. Right on brand, right on target.

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Philip Sellers: I've also joined with Solutions Architect Andy Green, here at Zentegra. Andy is a former Nutanix, sales engineer.

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Philip Sellers: And joined us about 10 months ago?

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Andy Greene: 11 at this point.

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Philip Sellers: Alright, we're working on that year, and we'll be celebrating that soon on an upcoming episode. Andy, you've been in the field with us for a while now, and helping our customers. Do you get to talk about future-proofing?

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Philip Sellers: With customers and their strategies.

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Andy Greene: I do, yes. That's a big part of what we do here at Zentegra, right? We always want to understand the strategy for the client, where they are today, where they want to go, and from there, we can start to think about how we can help them get there.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, that's fantastic. Yeah, we definitely want that partnership to be able to talk strategy with our customers, and so, I'm happy.

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Philip Sellers: When we find customers that find value in the way that we go to market, it is a little different, but something that we're passionate about. We want to get to know our customers deeply and help them succeed.

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Philip Sellers: And I'm also joined with Chris Calhoun. Chris is also a Solutions Architect here at Zentegra.

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Philip Sellers: Just celebrated over a year with us, and

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Philip Sellers: You know, it feels like you've been here since the furniture moved in, so I like that.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Well, that's what I was supposed to do as the furniture mover.

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Philip Sellers: And miscellaneous other assignments, right?

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: There you go. Yep.

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Philip Sellers: So, as always, I have to ask, Chris, how's your day going?

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: It really is fantastic for today, I can truly say that. So, fantastic!

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Philip Sellers: I love Chris on the team, because that kind of enthusiasm is what he brings every single day. And, guys, I'm always happy to get together and talk tech, so…

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Philip Sellers: When we're thinking about future-proofing, there's a lot of change going on in the industry right now.

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Philip Sellers: Just rapid fire, what do you think of in terms of strategies or technology related to future-proofing?

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: for me, I definitely think of the idea of agility, not getting locked into a solution. You know, obviously with the change over the past year or so from

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: guys thinking, hey, look, we might be VMware customers for the rest of our lives, to now we're looking for an exit strategy, you know? So, I think that with that in mind.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: that the blog post that we had in the past was around, hey, change adverse versus change acceptance, and understanding that migrating workloads, and it's… it's not all a bad thing, and I think that

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Change for the better's good, and this is a definite topic of discussion that helps us future-proof, in that knowing

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: where customers, as Andy said, hey, let's understand where you are today, and what does the next

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: 5 to 10 years look like? Or maybe even, next…

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: year look like, so that we can help customers navigate that path forward that's uncertain, in many, many customers' minds of what the future will hold. So I think that this direction and Nutanix as a whole helps to lend itself to that. You didn't ask all of that, maybe you did, but that was…

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: I think I'm done.

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Philip Sellers: Andy Jarra, what do you think of?

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Andy Greene: I'm gonna go with portability and scalability, right? If we, if we're architected in a way that lets us run the workload wherever it makes sense, and if we can scale up and down dynamically, I think we've done a… we've gone a long way towards making sure that we have a solution that's flexible.

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Andy Greene: And can meet those needs as the business continues to grow and evolve.

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Jirah Cox: Portability,

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Jirah Cox: came to my mind as well, as much as we, you know, hear these days about, you know, hey, it's whatever it was plus AI, like network management plus AI, threat defense plus AI, you know, changing out hardware platforms, changing out software platforms.

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Jirah Cox: my mind goes to… what I hear the most about from customers? It's migrations, right? Like, we are in X, and we are moving to Y, right? It is maybe one of the hardest things to future-proof, because given a long enough timeline, you're gonna want to move something, probably, in your environment from somewhere to somewhere else.

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Philip Sellers: I think that's fair. I was gonna call foul if somebody didn't say AI, because it's just permutate… permeating? That's the right word… permeating everything that we talk about in IT here lately. So, thank you for bringing that up.

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Jirah Cox: That's the value I bring.

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Philip Sellers: That, that, there you go, yeah, on top of it.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, the blog post we've got today is Freedom to Innovate. So as we talk about future-proofing, you know, I agree with you, Jairah. A lot of it's migrating. Some of the migration, though, is also in retooling and refactoring applications, maybe recoding them, moving them to a newer…

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Philip Sellers: or a cloud-native platform, and so…

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Philip Sellers: This blog post is really around how a complete and open Kubernetes platform can future-proof your business.

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Philip Sellers: It was written by Dan Cerulli, Senior Director of Product Management for Cloud Native at Nutanix. And Jairah, if I'm not mistaken, didn't Dan come in as part of the acquisition of D2IQ?

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Jirah Cox: He did, he did. But.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, absolutely. You know, what's great about Nutanix and where you're at today is you're in a thought leadership position, helping lead and craft

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Philip Sellers: the future direction of the cloud-native Foundation, CNCF, and you're a major contributor now through the acquisition of D2IQ and Nutanix Kubernetes platform.

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Philip Sellers: You know, for our listeners, and I've heard this a few times, we joked about it before we started recording, but…

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Philip Sellers: Tell us what Kubernetes is for someone who's not familiar.

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Jirah Cox: I… I think Vyra's definition of Kubernetes is,

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Jirah Cox: obviously, fundamentally, it's a container, right? Which we've all heard so much about for containers for applications.

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Jirah Cox: It's a way, as a container, right, to ship both the application you want to run, as well as everything it needs, right? So if you need certain kinds of Perl scripts, or Python libraries, or, you know, other bits that you've written that power your app, you can ship all of that together in one thing.

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Jirah Cox: My… my gyroism for that is it's… it's the most fashionable way to install applications, right? So, we've… in some ways, we've sort of been,

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Jirah Cox: shipping everything that our apps need for the longest time, right? Either, you know, back when the world was young and, you know, dinosaurs ruled the Earth, there were mainframes, right? We wrote the code right there with everything else that they needed.

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Jirah Cox: In the 90s, right, we had the rise of the MSI and the EXE installer at Next next finish.

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Jirah Cox: there was, you know, a period of time where it was cloned the Git repo, and then customized some variables, and run it in your instance, and then occasionally re-sync back to source. And nowadays, it's docker pull, you know, a certain container, and it's everything you need. So the everything you need.

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Jirah Cox: is not necessarily a new motion for IT,

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Jirah Cox: the monolithic packaging of it's just one thing, right, that I can push to one place, pull everywhere, and have the infrastructure to run it, that's sort of the promised land, right? The outcome that we want to get to.

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Jirah Cox: credit to a coworker of mine who taught me the joke of, you know, Kubernetes is the world's answer to when the developer says, well, it works on my laptop, then operations says, okay, we're shipping your laptop.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, and that's the thing, right? It's about that consistency of it working the same every time. That's what containers are really about, is that consistency, so that you're not changing the container. It is immutable, and…

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Philip Sellers: It is the same, no matter where it gets invoked, no matter where it gets run.

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Philip Sellers: And Kubernetes is that framework of all the other things outside of that.

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Philip Sellers: I've been thinking about this topic and how to convey it for a series of Lunch and Learns that we're working on, and it kind of dawned on me that Kubernetes is sort of like the scaffolding

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Philip Sellers: that gets the container all of the other things it needs. So, it's kind of like, you know, building a building.

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Philip Sellers: out of containers, and it's the scaffolding kind of around it, because Kubernetes itself is just orchestration.

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Philip Sellers: But there are plugins to it, and I love the slide that Nutanix has. It's kind of like a sunburst. And there's 12 different areas, different plugins that you need to make choices around.

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Philip Sellers: So that you can observe what's going on, so that you can encrypt or inspect what's going on in the network traffic, so that you can talk to storage, so that you can talk to a network, so that you can load balance.

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Philip Sellers: And so, Kubernetes is a modular framework

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Philip Sellers: that surrounds the container and orchestrates it. I love…

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Philip Sellers: the succinct way that you say it, though, Jairah, it's the fashionable way to deploy applications. That sums it up in a great way, I think, for infrastructure folks listening.

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Philip Sellers: You know, this is that… that deadly part of the IT world.

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Philip Sellers: That lifts… that lives between… Infrastructure, and developers.

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Philip Sellers: And developers really want to code. That's what they're passionate about. That's what they want to do. They don't want to think about load balancing and instances and metrics and…

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Philip Sellers: all of this other crazy stuff that Kubernetes allows us in the infrastructure practice to wrap around their code. And that's part of the challenge, and…

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Philip Sellers: the opportunity for us in the infrastructure space. So,

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Philip Sellers: Jair, I'm gonna throw it back to you one more time. Let's talk a little bit now specifically about NKP as a release and a product from Nutanix.

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Philip Sellers: You know, we're talking about… A…

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Philip Sellers: framework, a opinionated stack. What does that mean?

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Jirah Cox: I think, an opinionated stack means that if you don't have an opinion, you get to use ours by default, right? So, there's not that requirement, that a lot of people perceive or even have tried before in the past.

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Jirah Cox: Around, you know, hey, I want Kubernetes, or I need to vend Kubernetes to my application teams in my infrastructure, therefore I have to go become an expert first.

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Jirah Cox: right, once I'm an expert, then… then we'll be… then we'll be off to the races, right? Now we can start deploying. That, that opinionated means, guess what? We have… we have an opinion, for what Kubernetes can look like in production.

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Jirah Cox: we'll get to the other part here. The open part means that if you have a different opinion than ours, we can change ours, right? We can change it and customize the deployment, and use your preferences instead. This is a great, like, middle-of-the-road approach.

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Jirah Cox: Because obviously there's lots of other ways you can run containers, right? You can, of course, take on that whole science project of, I want to do all the integration, all the testing, have a choice from the… if you look at CNCF, right, the whole cloud-native foundation, there's, like, 1,200 different options, right, that you can pick from.

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Jirah Cox: Across the entire suite of integrations, where, like you said, Phil, you know, 12… between 12 and, you know, 24 or 30 or so core decisions you make for a given deployment stack.

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Jirah Cox: this is why Kubernetes in the cloud took off so well, right? I can just run

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Jirah Cox: The container is vended by… or the Kubernetes infrastructure vended by my cloud provider, right? By Amazon, by Azure, by Google, and by doing so, that's all decided for me. Right now, the downside is they get very deeply embedded into their infrastructure, and I can't make a change as easily as I want it to, maybe down the road.

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Jirah Cox: Right, or how would I federate, you know, that on-prem with my cloud, infrastructure as well? Gets a little challenging, gets a little, gets a little bit more interesting, maybe, than we want our infrastructure to be.

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Jirah Cox: So, you know, I can always use the cloud, I can always use vendor proprietary stuff, I can always go full open source.

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Jirah Cox: Right? But where we like… the one thing we like about our strategy at Nutanix is the fact that it's kind of middle of the road there, right? It's all the openness, all the completeness. It is as turnkey as you want it to be, but as customizable as you…

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Jirah Cox: As you also often need it to be, right? Sometimes I use an analogy of, like, a kit car that comes assembled, right? You have full permission to tear everything down, change out a component, but also you can just put the keys in and drive.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, that makes sense. So, what you're also saying is that the cloud providers have their own opinionated stack.

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Philip Sellers: You know, they have their answers to all of these questions, and sometimes when you get locked into that, that's the only way you're gonna be able to do it.

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Jirah Cox: Yeah, we're probably not, unique in the possessing of opinion.

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Philip Sellers: Thanks.

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Philip Sellers: But that's good, though, so it's an easy button, also. Having an opinionated stack means you don't have to be experts in those 12 different disciplines, you can take the easy route, and that's got value for customers, too.

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Jirah Cox: Yep. And some things, like, in that, both categories and stuff, like ingress, mesh, discoverability.

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Jirah Cox: Cost governance, observability, disaster recovery, replication and backups.

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Jirah Cox: all these different areas where, kind of just like any other application infrastructure, I need answers for how am I going to do these things in a containerized world. The same way I do them in the physical world, in the virtualized world.

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Jirah Cox: in the… often in the functions world, for serverless, even sometimes down to, like, my workstations, right? I need to have some kind of observability, for them. So, nothing unique, necessarily, in the containerized space, but something that I do have to have an answer for that might not be my previous tooling that I was used to, before.

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Philip Sellers: 100%. So, as we go through the blog here, Andy, I'm gonna throw to you next. When Kubernetes emerged.

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Philip Sellers: for IT development, deployments, there were primarily three options, that they cover here in the blog post. What are those 3 options?

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Andy Greene: Sure, yeah, first was a proprietary enterprise-grade solution that included everything. But, you know, it was really a monolithic black box that locked you in with a single vendor.

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Andy Greene: Second, I think we saw, you know, build your own Kubernetes was always an option, right? You can go out and select your own tools for monitoring, for networking, etc, for application delivery. And then, you know, with that, you've got to manage all of the updates, you've got to manage security, networking, etc. And then finally, we had the public cloud services. And, you know.

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Andy Greene: Each of these kind of had its own benefits, advantages, disadvantages, but, you know, the first one that we talked about really wasn't customizable. The second option that we talked about there, it made it impossible for organizations that didn't have the strong Kubernetes skills to deploy their own and make it, you know, work and make it secure the way that they wanted it to be.

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Andy Greene: And then finally, I think, you know, using the cloud provider locked you into using cloud provider add-ons as well. So, you know, just… there's a lot of flexibility in having another approach that we can use.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah.

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Philip Sellers: So, from a Nutanix perspective, this language carries over from D2IQ to NKP.

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Philip Sellers: It's billed as complete and open, and so I think we understand the complete piece of things, but to double down on it, it means it's production-ready, it's an enterprise-ready Kubernetes platform that answers all those questions, so that part makes sense.

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Philip Sellers: What about open, Chris? What does the open piece of complete and open mean?

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: I think it doesn't pigeonhole you… hold you into specific decisions on technology, in the sense that, you know, and this goes back to Jairin's comments about, hey,

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: If it worked on your laptop as a developer.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: that's the only frame of reference for the environment. This allows you to have,

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Freedom of choice for that network, having a vanilla, type setup so that,

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: your environments are open and aren't exclusive to the decisions you make on infrastructure impact the ability to run a specific containerized application. It gives you the choices so that you do have flexibility, like you mentioned in the sunburst of

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: From a security stance, if you as a business or a customer already have specific vendors that you're working with, it gives that freedom and balance of.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: choices, but also guided experiences, too. So, I think that that's really the best way to kind of summarize that.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, and I think that's… that's true to the spirit of what Kubernetes is. It was created to be an open framework

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Philip Sellers: where you could plug things in modularly. And so, really, NKP is that coming to fruition, right? It's got an opinion you can use by default, but it doesn't force that opinion upon you. You can swap out

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Philip Sellers: today, or tomorrow or, you know, 5 years ahead when you have more experience and you decide that the default's not the right fit. The other thing I think that's hugely important, and this goes into a little bit of minutiae.

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Philip Sellers: is the way that things are controlled and the way that things are created are using open APIs, so there's nothing proprietary here, and that's an important, important thing, because risk comes with that proprietary thing. In its infancy, there's a lot of…

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Philip Sellers: Kubernetes.

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Philip Sellers: Companies and platforms that came out that had proprietary answers to fill in some of the gaps in the earlier versions.

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Philip Sellers: Let's talk a little bit about the risk of closed or less open Kubernetes platforms. Jairah, can you kind of walk us through this and some of the risk factors that come with,

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Philip Sellers: I guess a, proprietary Kubernetes platform.

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Jirah Cox: Sure, yeah, the article, outlines four of them here. I think they're pretty spot on, right? Big one first is being lock-in, right? So, if I'm… if I'm building any kind of product on top of

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Jirah Cox: open source, right? Then it kind of behooves me to kind of add my own special sauce to it, right? And, you know, add my value there. So when I do that, then that becomes something that only my platform has, versus what is the goodness of, like, the upstream open source

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Jirah Cox: software itself. So that is then something that probably only people get from me, versus being part of the ecosystem.

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Jirah Cox: Right? But another set of that coin is that now, as I'm adding my code to this, then when the upstream, platform, in this case like Kubernetes, ships, I have to take that release, and then now put that in the lab, right? And check all of my code against it for compatibility.

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Jirah Cox: that can often lead to limited innovation, right? Or even a slowness of releases, right? Because then it's… it gets harder and harder to follow the actual upstream Kubernetes release there, right? Which, of course, we're very, you know, happy to say we follow upstream releases, with NKP.

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Jirah Cox: there's, with that lock-in, right, of course, comes portability challenges, right? Because if you're using my thing, then, by default, if you can't get that somewhere else, then you probably don't have as many options with moving that around.

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Jirah Cox: when you want to, and all this can tend towards, some possible silos, right? Because Kubernetes itself is built for openness, and being able to run basically anywhere from, like, quite literally, your watch, your phone, your laptop, a server, a fleet of servers, bare metal at the edge.

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Jirah Cox: I don't know, airplanes, you know, dashboards of cars, anywhere you want to.

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Jirah Cox: Oh, pardon, what'd you say, Phil?

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Philip Sellers: Fast food restaurant down the street.

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Jirah Cox: There you go, yeah, exactly, right? Anywhere. The, but if my platform, if I don't certify it to run all those places, well then, you have a subset of places now where you can run my product on top of Kubernetes, right, as more of a proprietary or closed

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Jirah Cox: ecosystem, right? So, some of the common challenges that we see kind of across the industry.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, and portability's really one of the main goals, and honestly, I think back, we've been chasing portability for applications for decades. I remember when Java first released, and the gray beard indicator, right? It was supposed to be right once, run anywhere.

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Philip Sellers: And unfortunately, Java didn't quite pan out that good, and, you know, there's lots of different reasons and factors, but Kubernetes, again, is trying to let that write-once-run-anywhere sort of concept come to real life.

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Philip Sellers: So let's talk a little bit about the benefits for end users. So, let's walk through these. Chris, what is a couple of the benefits for end users?

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: I think, really, what we talked about is that, the open source framework of… of the CNCF, having choices within that that are…

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: cutting-edge technologies that are, I'll say, pre-blessed, in the sense that, gives you completeness in the OpenStack is really something that,

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: without having to wait on specific vendor solutions gives you that freedom of choice early. And I think that that's… that's really the development to future-proof.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: If you make a decision now that may be wrong, or if you go with a vendor that doesn't see the bigger picture of 1 to 2 to 3 years down the road, then you don't have that freedom, and you are waiting on that vendor for…

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: lagging behind to come up with the next iteration, so I think that that's key, and then…

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: as Andy mentioned earlier, is, application mobility is really a key. Having open APIs and standard interfaces to communicate with your apps going forward is really the way forward.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: I would… I think that, you know, of course, AI is the trending term, but I think APIs and integration is really,

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: One of the key factors to our agility in being able to

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: help customers with solutions where, in the past, it may be that they were point solutions that didn't integrate. Now, most companies are.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: pushing for these APIs to interact with their products so that you can have that mobility.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: And that's just the first two on the list, but there are a few more. Obviously, I'll throw it to whoever's next in the hit list, to go through.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Why don't you take those? Like, let's talk through some more of the benefits that are there.

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Andy Greene: Sure thing. Yeah, unified, hybrid, multi-cloud operations. Using open platforms with APIs, like Chris said, allows you to run Kubernetes across all of your environments.

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Andy Greene: Second to that, I would say customization. A modular, you know, open platform lets you mix and match open source and commercial solutions to really customize it to your business needs. So you're not just tied into a single vendor software stack.

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Andy Greene: And then finally, you know, lower costs and smaller teams. With unified Kubernetes operations across all of your environments, you need less specialized teams, and so therefore things are just more efficient, and costs should go down with that.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, for someone who's not watched or not super familiar with Kubernetes, something like the open APIs and cluster API may be something that you just glance over, but…

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Philip Sellers: being able to talk to and manage all of your clusters and fleets of Kubernetes clusters around the world.

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Philip Sellers: In a unified way?

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Philip Sellers: That is huge.

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Philip Sellers: Cluster API is… is one of the…

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Philip Sellers: leveling factors for us. Yes, you could have Kubernetes everywhere, but if you're not all using Cluster API, then that means you're going to have different pieces of tooling, different command lines, different configurations.

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Philip Sellers: configuration drift, and so that all equals risk. And you can eliminate that by having a common way of managing all of your clusters everywhere.

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Philip Sellers: Cluster API is a huge leveling factor, so I think of Kubernetes as sort of like dial tone, right? Everything…

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Philip Sellers: else gets built on top of that. So, it's one of the huge things for us, I think, you know, in terms of being able to assure…

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Philip Sellers: that… you can really run anywhere. And that… that piece was always the…

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Philip Sellers: the tough thing. Yes, Java let us write once. The run anywhere was somewhat limited, and this is really focused on solving the run anywhere problems. Is that a fair statement, you think, Jairah?

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Jirah Cox: It is, I mean, it just… it gives you so many more options, right? Whether… for customizability, right? Like, out of the gate, you know, Kubernetes lets you say, I need a small cluster, I can grow it to a large cluster, I can scale it in response to the need,

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Jirah Cox: I mean, there probably is a way that Java could have done that, right? If I got enough Blu-ray players together in one place.

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Jirah Cox: you know, got my soldering iron out, I could probably do that, right? And then have that, you know, Java Frankenstein monster available to me, but this is just ready to go, you know, right now.

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Jirah Cox: the article even talks about how there's even benefits here for people that ship the software, right? The software vendors themselves, because Kubernetes becomes that lowest common denominator that everyone will agree to, right, and code against, as in, this is what the infra team provides, this is what the application team expects.

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Jirah Cox: kind of that great little decoder ring meat in the middle, right, for what are the benefits that come along with that, right? That ship software faster, let the ecosystem grow, and fundamentally, right, support, you know, that openness model.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, 100%. And, you know, it's, it's… It's certainly… around speed.

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Philip Sellers: And that's the other thing that you hit on, Chris, at the very first point. Access to CNCF innovation, well…

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Philip Sellers: How does it being open… and complete. How does that… tap into…

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Philip Sellers: CNCF innovation versus something that's proprietary.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: It means that, obviously, the open source innovation

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: It's gonna make its way into the…

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: the Nutanix Kubernetes platform even faster. And I think that with that.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: It doesn't slow you down as a business, and it allows you to continue to make those decisions going forward.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, I mean, something as simple as, you know, what…

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Philip Sellers: what goes into the QA cycles when you've got extra software, or software that's not in the open source project, you're just gonna delay getting that innovation out. So, it cuts down on the overall lag. That makes sense.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: streamline.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah. Well, and so that takes us right into the benefits for independent software vendors. Open Kubernetes approach is also vital for the software vendors, and we've got 3 benefits here. So,

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Philip Sellers: Chris, do you want to go quickly through those 3 benefits?

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Absolutely. It's exactly what we just mentioned. Faster route to market.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Developing open source components, APIs, ISVs, obviously gets you a quicker launch cycle, with less validation, more streamlining.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: The ecosystem growth itself. As you start small and continue to grow, if you've built that framework, you… you're…

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: In a more extensible, scaffolding that you mentioned earlier, relating back, that if the structure's solid, you move on quicker and more efficient.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Efficiently. And then the open source core model. Obviously…

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: to me, that goes back to a common language, and that's really, to me, setting the expectations for communication, just as a whole between, APIs and open source projects just in general.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: To me, knowing that you're gonna have,

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: enhanced load balancers, security tools, and observability solutions already in place can help you grow that environment quicker. So I think that that really hits on those three bullet point benefits.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Jara, Andy, anything else to add to that?

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Jirah Cox: Well said. I think, I think flexibility yields speed. Speed yields, value. With value comes investment. Investment breeds open source, and open source increases flexibility. So it's a, it's a great virtuous circle.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah.

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Philip Sellers: And, you know, when we talk about this, this is also, you know, from the beginning, talking about future-proofing.

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Philip Sellers: you know, modularity is another huge part of future-proofing, so that's the next section of the blog, talking about the power of modularity. Andy, as you think about modularity and how it helps you from a future-proofing standpoint, what kind of sticks out there to you? Like, what…

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Philip Sellers: what about Kubernetes helps future-proof you?

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Andy Greene: You know, a modular system means that all of your key components, networking, ingress controllers, monitoring, security, all of these can easily be customized or even swapped out for something completely different, so…

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Andy Greene: You know, for example, if you start with a very popular open source load balancer.

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Andy Greene: but then maybe at a later date, you decide that you want to replace it with another either open or commercial solution. You've got that ability to go in, rip out the one component that you want to replace, replace it with the one that you want to move to, without breaking the entire system.

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Andy Greene: You know, it really enables you to tailor those Kubernetes environments, those deployments, to your unique needs.

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Andy Greene: Without hindering your ability to change and to adapt over time.

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Philip Sellers: So, what you're saying is Kubernetes is kind of like your answer to a 90s sitcom. And just bear with me here for a minute.

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Philip Sellers: So, it means that if a joke doesn't age well, you can just swap it out for another joke.

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Andy Greene: Pretty much, yes.

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Philip Sellers: Jairah's giggling. I'm enjoying it on the other end.

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Jirah Cox: That's a Taiwan example.

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Philip Sellers: Like, where are you going with this? Crazy man.

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Philip Sellers: But that's… that's it. I mean, future-proofing is all about that, so today's best of breed, you know, we want to be able to move to tomorrow's best of breed, because nothing's standing still here in our ecosystem. Everything's constantly evolving, so…

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Philip Sellers: We want to be able to adopt that as quickly as possible, and so what you're hearing is open Kubernetes and an open Kubernetes distribution is the way to facilitate that. So…

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Philip Sellers: as we kind of wrap up what's here in the blog, open's not just a technical decision, it's a strategic one. And so, as we've talked about these different things and the ability to leverage open, modular, very close to the open source community.

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Philip Sellers: all of that becomes speed and advantage to you and your organization. So, I think that's a great way of kind of wrapping up what we're talking about.

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Philip Sellers: you're delivering a Kubernetes platform that's open and complete, it's production-grade ready, it's supported.

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Philip Sellers: But it's also modular and flexible.

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Philip Sellers: And all of that equals future-proof.

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Philip Sellers: Any final thoughts, guys?

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: I think to Jara's point, obviously, the fashionable way to, install

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: workloads these days, it's not only fashionable, but it's streamlined. And I think that that's really the power of the platform.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: And I think it just fits well with folks that want every bit of those

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: ilities that we talked about. Agility, flexibility, how about that? Illities.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: And I think it just makes sense for those businesses, because, Nutanix helps with that. You know, it gives you that,

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: framework platform. We… I even heard a customer, speak today that mentioned, hey, look, we want to… we want a good, solid platform as we transition away from VMware, that we know that as we make decisions for our future.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: it's future-proof, and that's what I heard today, and I think that this is the strategy going forward, so I think it makes sense.

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Jirah Cox: I think it tied back to how we opened around, you know, those eternal problems of IT, one of them being just the never-ending migrations, right? And so it presents a path for deployment that also makes those future migrations, which we just know are an inevitability, that much easier and that much more streamlined.

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Andy Greene: Yeah, I think it's really just key to embracing the future, right? Embrace flexibility, embrace scalability, and then through that, we can unlock new opportunities, and we can grow. And I think that's what future-proofing is really all about.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah.

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Philip Sellers: And, you know, as we also said at the top of the episode, we were talking about AI.

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Philip Sellers: And almost exclusively, AI runs in containers.

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Philip Sellers: It's not a universal truth, but overwhelmingly, when we talk about large language models and a lot of

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Philip Sellers: AI innovation, those applications are written in containers, which means

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Philip Sellers: Sooner or later, if you're being talked about AI, you're also going to be talking about Kubernetes, and so we think it's an important topic. I do want to put this out. At the end of the blog post, there is a section where you can click to watch an on-demand webinar.

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Philip Sellers: to learn 7 simple steps, or 7 steps to simplify Kubernetes adoption, I highly recommend that you find the blog post. It's out on Nutanix.com slash blog.

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Philip Sellers: Title of it, again, is, Future Proofing, excuse me, Freedom to Innovate, How to Com… How a Complete and Open Kubernetes Platform Can Future Proof Your Business. Again, that link is at the very bottom of the post.

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Philip Sellers: Guys, thanks for joining me and having an interesting discussion around this. I hope for everyone listening that

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Philip Sellers: maybe you walk away today and think a little bit more, or know a little bit more about Kubernetes, maybe it's a little more approachable to you. But we're always here, also, to help, so reach out if there's ever anything we can do.

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Philip Sellers: If you're being approached about AI, if you're being approached about, Kubernetes, we're here to help, and definitely all want to help you, so, please reach out, and

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Philip Sellers: Thanks for listening today. I hope that you have a great day, and we will catch you on the next episode.