Bring complexity under control with enterprise-grade Kubernetes

No, it'll probably never be a doddle – but you don't have to take the hard way when deploying Kubernetes, says Nutanix

Sponsored Feature Containers are arguably business computing's biggest success story. Enhancing speed, agility, scalability and portability across IT environments, they have become foundational to enterprise application development.

Containerization boosts developer efficiency via its 'build once, run anywhere' ethos. And it's a thrifty concept, driving cost efficiencies through automated operations, and cutting capex by reducing infrastructure needs through higher resource usage.

Yet despite their compelling attractions, containers must be orchestrated to manage the complexity of running many at once. Orchestration automates tasks like deployment, scaling, networking, and troubleshooting to ensure application availability and efficiency.

Orchestration tools like Kubernetes handle the manual and error-prone processes required for a large number of containers. But Kubernetes' power and versatility comes with a reputation for being complex to deploy and complicated to manage. And while it brings quantifiable benefits for the infrastructure and operations (I&O) and DevOps teams directly tasked with mastering its intricacies, Kubernetes poses a steep learning curve for novices.

Kubernetes environments are further complicated by their very adaptability. They span multiple clusters, host a wide range of stateful applications, and increasingly operate across hybrid or multicloud architectures.

Enterprises often combine Kubernetes containers with outsourced applications, each requiring distinct security protocols, compliance requirements, integration challenges, pricing models, and vendor relationship management. This turns moderate complexity into an IT management morass.

The legacy app dilemma

A further challenge for I&O teams is that the containerization treatment is mostly reserved for new applications, leaving many legacy systems running on cloud-based or virtualized architectures. These cannot easily be migrated to containers, creating their own set of management headaches.

The benefits of containerization could be lost by having to run containerized and virtualized applications in separate IT environments. Having separate stacks is wasteful. It makes little sense to double-up on effort and hardware to support both when they are pursuing the same goal in different ways.

Enter the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform

Into this predicament Nutanix last year launched the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform – NKP – a hybrid cloud infrastructure management solution that enables automated lifecycle management for the entire Kubernetes stack.

NKP encompasses compute, storage, and networking into a single software-defined system that also integrates with the Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP) for scale-out data services. By doing so the platform enables enterprises to run applications and manage data across on-premises, public cloud, and edge.

The NKP product also aims to simplify IT management with a unified platform that offers advanced services like data management, security, and AI capabilities across clouds. And it enables automated lifecycle management across the entire Kubernetes stack.

"We launched NKP with a bold mission: to simplify Kubernetes for the enterprise and make hybrid multicloud container management as painless as possible," explains Dan Ciruli, vice president and general manager of cloud native at Nutanix. "In keeping with Nutanix's guiding commitment to help customers deploy any application anywhere, it was evident that they needed an enterprise container management platform as well – hence NKP."

One of the biggest challenges faced with cloud native applications is deploying, securing, and managing the rapidly expanding fleets of Kubernetes clusters being deployed on-premises and in public clouds, Ciruli continues: "Key to this is that NKP provides a consistent experience through a single control plane for deploying and managing Kubernetes clusters at scale across on-premises, public cloud, and edge locations."

Nailing the complexity conundrum

Nutanix designed NKP so that customers could undertake Kubernetes deployments without relying on third-party support.

"If an enterprise is implementing Kubernetes manually and without third-party support, it's difficult," says Ciruli. "It should be remembered that one key reason why Kubernetes took off in cloud is that the cloud vendors made it easy to install because they handled the installation. But there are many enterprises out there that have a requirement to deploy Kubernetes-managed containers outside of public clouds. And many organizations do not have the in-house skills to pull it off."

NKP enables customers that want to deploy Kubernetes on-premises to offer the same level of support that public cloud customers expect, Ciruli explains.

"Our customers can easily and rapidly not only have Kubernetes installed, but also access everything they need to successfully run a production Kubernetes cluster with full observability stack, with Service Mesh, continuous deployment tool – all integrated with their enterprise single sign-on provider," he says.

Containers and/or VMs?

NKP's scope extends beyond Kubernetes orchestration to help enterprises address the dual complexities of managing container fleets and myriad VMs. This is a long-term undertaking, according to Ciruli.

"It's a mistake to assume that containers are going to replace both new VMs and in-situ VMs," Ciruli cautions. "I'm old enough to remember the mass transition from host-centric mainframes to distributed applications on client/server architectures. Soon afterwards most businesses were running their critical applications on client/server, but those mainframes never went away entirely."

Ciruli adds: "The lesson here is that once an application is put into production it will likely stay for a long, long time. So, sure, right now if you are a software developer it's far easier to develop for container and then deploy that as a container. But there are still millions of apps running in VMs across enterprises around the world – and, for the most part, those apps are going to stay in VMs."

What's more, Nutanix avers, while container adoption is rapidly outpacing the growth of VMs, containers likely will not replace VMs outright. Rather, containerization technology will drive the speed and efficiency of application development, whereas virtualization drives the speed and efficiency of infrastructure management.

"So enterprises will juggle both – apps running in VMs, apps running in containers – which is not ideal from a resource efficiency perspective," Ciruli says, "and makes it one more of the problems that Nutanix with NKP can solve."

Nutanix brings both together on a single platform with proven enterprise-grade virtualization, Kubernetes, and data services, he adds.

Completing the puzzle: Cloud Native AOS

Kubernetes orchestration is a many splendored thing. As well as handling day-to-day requirements like automation, it must also encompass functions like data storage and management.

So, Ciruli believes, as their data becomes more distributed both inside and outside of clouds, enterprises are looking for a consistent way to protect, replicate, and restore data across Kubernetes infrastructure in data centers, bare metal edge locations, and cloud-native hyperscalers.

"What's been missing is a common data platform that can run across bare metal, virtualised and containerised infrastructure," Ciruli explains. "That is where Nutanix Cloud Native AOS comes in."

Announced in May 2025, Nutanix's Cloud Native AOS solution provides the core storage and data services for NKP, extending enterprise storage directly into Kubernetes without needing a hypervisor.

"NKP manages the deployment and lifecycle of Kubernetes clusters, while Cloud Native AOS provides the persistent storage for those clusters through microservices running within Kubernetes itself," says Ciruli, "simplifying data management, resilience and mobility for containerised applications."

Cloud Native AOS completes the puzzle by enabling storage and data services that can run directly on cloud-native infrastructure anywhere in clouds or on bare metal servers.

"Eliminating the need for a hypervisor, Cloud Native AOS allows users to consolidate storage management across the distributed hybrid cloud," explains Ciruli. "It simplifies Day-two intelligent operations for Kubernetes applications and their data, anywhere."

Nutanix's AOS software is the backbone of its platform for data, platform-as-a-service, and AI. Cloud Native AOS extends it to stateful, native Kubernetes clusters in cloud and bare-metal server environments.

Enterprises are increasingly adopting Kubernetes for application orchestration, but integrating these cloud-native applications into existing workflows is a challenge, Ciruli reports. Cloud Native AOS helps to bridge this requirement, bringing data mobility and disaster recovery to the data persistence layer of cloud-native applications.

"We have customers running Cloud Native AOS in the cloud right now," says Ciruli, "and in 2026 will have it running on bare metal servers for on-premises data centers. So cloud native AOS is one of the most exciting things that Nutanix has got going on."

Future secured

NKP exceeds NSA/CISA Kubernetes security hardening guidelines, and can be configured to meet defined security standards, Ciruli points out, with each component scanned for vulnerabilities prior to release. Catering to sectors like defense and healthcare, NKP also simplifies air-gapped deployments via self-contained images and purpose-built automation.

Financial services is another vertical showing marked interest in NKP, says Ciruli. "For example, at Nutanix .NEXT 2025 we heard from North American wealth management firm Edward Jones, which has moved from a manual, VM-based setup to NKP to better support its growing client-base."

Edward Jones sees strong value in NKP, particularly around cost transparency, operational stability, and future alignment with AI and platform consolidation strategies, Ciruli says.

Looking back, Ciruli sees "a fantastic first year for NKP". Adoption "exceeded every goal that we had. Nutanix already has hundreds of customers around the world using NKP. We made sales in 44 countries last year, which is kind of amazing given that the solution has been out there for little more than 12 months."

Sponsored by Nutanix.