Over the last few weeks we went over the Cloud Operating Model as it pertains to Self-Service. We broke this section out into four parts because there are many things and areas where Self-Service provides tremedous advantage but we had to start with the Foundation, the Platform. In this last article i’m going to provide a combination of written content and videos that will show you a modern Infrastucture Platform that provides a full suite of capabilities. Now, if you have read my Bio, you know that I work at Nutanix. There’s a reason i’ve been working for Nutanix coming up on eight years now. At first, it started with a simple premise, to provide a Enterprise Grade Appliance to collapse the three-tier model, bring data closer to the application and simplify the full life cylce from procurement to day two operations.. Over the course of the time i’ve worked here and still to this day, the innovation train is full steam ahead. We have since grown into a full stack PLATFORM that provides all the capabilities that modern Enterprises need and we’ve done this with a unified management experience and extensibility of these services anywhere.
At the very core, Nutanix is accelerating the adoption of the Cloud Operating Model. We do this by allowing our customers to focus on what matters, application and service delivery and to enable that through our Hybrid Multi-Cloud services delivery model. These services are encompassed under five key focus areas:
- Virtual Server Infrastructure
- Virtual Container Infrastructure
- Virtual Desktop Infrastructure
- Unified Data Services
- Hybrid Multi-Cloud Global Operations
Within these areas are simplified solutions and capabilities however, there is integration within all of these services to deliver on the use cases. It starts at building a solid Enterprise Grade Foundation where services are layered and easily deployed through an integrated Marketplace. Let’s walk through the Platform to show you the capabilities and how simple it is to be ready for consumption (i’m trying out some AI voice solutions so there may be some solution pronunciation issues but you’ll understand everything it’s saying):
Now that we’ve given a bit of an overview of a modern Extensible Platform and you can see how easy it is to get to deliver core services for your applications, we can now get into integration. As you recall in my Cloud Operating Model on Automation blog post, the goal is to automate as much as possible. Automation will provide rapid agility for delivering services to your end users and customers and should be at the very core of Self Service. It’s the automation layer that truely provides the agility behind Self Service. As I explained previously, integration with modern Automation tools that layer above substrates is key. I mention some of these tools like Terraform and Ansible. In the next demo video, we are going to take advantage of the Nutanix Terraform provider and Ansible playbooks by deploying a Rancher Kubernetes Cluster. You will see how the Nutanix Platform integration with Terraform can rapidly deliver the infrastructure for your Rancher deployment. After, we’ll kick off an Ansible playbook that stands up a edge higly available K3S cluster with Load Balancer for both Kubernetes API and your applications. Think of your use cases as you watch the demo content:
Now that we showed integration with the most popular automation tools today, what about a Platform that includes a simpler form of automation for foundational services? How about low/no code automation? You’ve seen that there are some skills and a learning curve to leverage tools like Terraform and Ansible and I will tell you right now it’s worth it to get your teams using these tools, but what about basic integration that can save time? With the Nutanix Platform we provide a simplistic approach to provide core functionality and services to your applications. We do this with policy based management with tagging. We call these tags, categories. Let’s take a look at the power of categories and policy based management:
Self Service is key to deliver on the Cloud Operating Model. As you have just seen from the Nutanix Marketplace we can deliver infrastructure services as well as applications that also include core foundational automation. What about complex applications that require many different types of services, Cloud Native Applications that consume DBaaS, S3 compatible objects services running on an Platform integrated Kubernetes solution ? In the automation video we showed a basic foundation for an edge use case for Kubernetes using K3S but let’s look at a complex application and service delivery through a modern platform that can natively provide these robust services:
As we progress through the Platform capabilities, Service and Application delivery we can’t leave out Developers and how modern teams are delivering applications through the Dev/Ops model. Stay tuned for the next segment as we bring in Dev/Ops capabilities using common tooling to deliver an application, and how GitOps can speed delivery time for changes within your infrastructure or application. As you walk through these demos and content, think about how this can be leveraged in your environments, where the Platform is providing tremendous value by bringing together all of these services and enabling the Cloud Operating model with both native and integrated automation capabilities. We’ll also look at how AI is assisting with programming in a huge way by using tools like GitHub Copilot which saved a ton of time putting together the Terraform and Ansible code. I also want to give a shout out to Techno Tim for providing a foundation for the Ansible playbooks for the K3S deployments!
Have a great week and we’ll see you next Sunday!
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