AI Cloud Native and Hybrid Cloud Work Together

In this Tech Barometer podcast, Tobi Knaup, general manager for Cloud Native at Nutanix, explains what’s accelerating cloud native application development and how enterprises run these apps across hybrid multicloud IT environments.

Find more enterprise cloud news, features stories and profiles at The Forecast.

Transcript (AI generated):

Tobi Knaup: Cloud Native really is a concept that describes how to build and run modern applications. Those applications are typically microservice-oriented, they run in containers, and they’re dynamically managed. On top of a container platform, typically that’s Kubernetes, that’s really become the industry standard. Kubernetes runs anywhere. You can run it on the public cloud. You can run it on a private cloud. You can run it on the edge. So if you’re building applications on top of Kubernetes in containers, that makes them truly portable so you can run them anywhere, hybrid multicloud.

Jason Lopez: That’s the voice of Tobi Knaup, the general manager for Cloud Native at Nutanix. In this short podcast, the editor of The Forecast, Ken Kaplan, chats with Tobi about the integration of cloud-native applications and hybrid multi-cloud environments. In this discussion they touch on cloud-native applications across various cloud environments; the synergy between AI and Kubernetes; and the shift to Kubernetes for consistency and portability.

[Related: Flattening the Cloud Native Learning Curve]

Ken Kaplan: What was the limitation that’s been unlocked with Kubernetes?

Tobi Knaup: The limitation that was there before is there wasn’t a consistent sort of packaging format for applications that made them really easily portable. And containers kind of provide that abstraction. In computer science, we sometimes call it a layer of indirection. So it abstracts applications away from the underlying infrastructure. And containers are a very lightweight way to package an application, so it’s very easy to ship them all around, all over the place.

Ken Kaplan: And their connection to managing data in different ways, is that something that you have to think about?

Tobi Knaup: Yeah, absolutely. So containers, or Kubernetes when it was first launched, actually did not have support for data. It purely ran stateless applications. So only a few years later, the community, it was actually our engineers at Data2IQ together with Google, created what’s called the container storage interface. And so that became the industry standard for attaching storage to containers. But that was still very bare bones, just simple volumes attached to containers. And so what we did here at Nutanix recently with NDK (application-level services for Kubernetes), really takes that to the next level. Really adds capabilities for disaster recovery and resilience. So makes it really, really easy to run these kind of sensitive stateful applications on Kubernetes.

Ken Kaplan: Awesome, and we’ve been hearing the word resilience and it sounds like the hybrid multicloud, building your apps in containers, these kinds of things are bringing some more control and flexibility for things that you need to keep your business running. Talk about hybrid multicloud in the sense that it’s a choice or it’s where people are today. How did we get here?

Tobi Knaup: Yeah, so I think there are many reasons for why people choose hybrid or multicloud. It’s typically not what a lot of people think at first. I think when hybrid cloud or multicloud first became a concept, people thought, people are going to look for the cheapest compute all over the world and that’s where things are running. I talked to some customers that are doing that actually, but they’re kind of rare and they’re typically hedge funds. So of course they look at market prices. But for most people, the constraints are different. It could be regulatory constraints, right? Data needs to reside in a certain geography or frankly just what an organization is comfortable with, where they’re comfortable putting their most sensitive data. Some don’t want to put it on the public cloud, right? But they appreciate the flexibility and the dynamicism of a public cloud for new developments. So they’re sort of running their steady state production workloads on prem, but they’re giving cloud environments to the development teams for building the next generation of apps, which then may move on prem later when they go to production. So I think a lot of organizations ...