Red Hat & Nutanix: a partnership forged in cloud-native leadership

By its very nature, software application development constantly evolves. As each generation of applications has emerged over the decades, we as an industry have taken advantage of the latest tier of application, data and services modernisation as it has arrived.

The most recent and most impactful change that we have witnessed in recent times is of course cloud computing. As enterprises now move to embrace cloud-native deployment as the new modern standard, technology integration and strategic platform partnerships have never been more important.

These underpinning truths are a large part of how and why Nutanix has formed a unique bond with Red Hat, to jointly serve a customer base that is characterised by organisations who insist upon best-of-breed technologies aligned to maximise customer benefits.

Modern infrastructure - modern applications

Today we know that modern applications are defined by the use of progressive and essentially modernised infrastructure and platform services.

The rise of cloud-native environments and the accelerating effects of automation have created a computing era unlike any before it. If we consider the combined impact of containers, microservices, service meshes, APIs and MLOps - to name just a handful of new forces - it’s not hard to understand why modern cloud-native environments can suffer from spiralling complexity.

But what does this new universe of cloud-native modernisation really look like - and what are Nutanix and Red Hat doing to make sure customers can be successful in this arena?

To explain and validate our unified effort, enterprises need to first think about what cloud-native really means. It is the process of creating applications that will inherently exploit the core benefits of cloud i.e. scalability, flexibility, elasticity, interoperability and manageability.

Across private on-premises clouds, public clouds and the hybrid cloud instances that straddle both domains, enterprises adopting cloud-native advantages must now align and engineer their IT stacks to take advantage of immutable infrastructures and APIs that will interconnect and build new services.

Best-in-class service integration

While the arsenal of tools in the cloud-native powerhouse are clear enough to point to and identify, implementing and evolving the full spectrum of accelerators in the modern cloud-native catalogue is rarely a simple plug-and-play process.

Building cloud-native services using technologies such as Docker for cloud application container build, test and deployment processes alongside Kubernetes for cloud application container orchestration is a standard, but complex, element of cloud-native software development. Combined with the opportunity to embrace serverless functions, connect via APIs and use emerging platforms for data streaming, we can see that there is a lot of power to embrace, but equally, a lot of engineering skills are required.

This is why Nutanix and Red Hat have spent many hours working to create a large portion of service integration to enable customers to simplify their technology estates.

Nutanix Red Hat open hybrid cloud

We have watched the deployment landscape carefully and carefully listened to customers to understand their needs. In order to step up to the challenge, 2021 saw us forge tighter integration between Red Hat OpenShift and Nutanix software. Our shared vision across the cloud-native landscape is known as open hybrid cloud and it is still continuously evolving, much like cloud platforms and deployment models themselves.

Because hybrid native-cloud is a blending of different technologies, Red Hat and Nutanix have partnered at the most practical and pragmatic level possible. It has been our aim from the start to work in unison with the shape of modern DevOps practices and to reflect the operational constraints that we know enterprises both large and small have to work within.

Given these truths and the rationale for Red Hat and Nutanix’s cloud-native alliance, we can now see more clearly what makes a cloud-native app cloud-native. If we can grasp a clearer view of what factors form these abstracted instances of virtualisation, then we can more effectively place workloads on them in the most productive, most performant and most cost-effective way possible. 

The challenge - and goal - ahead

There are challenges ahead of us, we know that. Managing the complexities of hybrid cloud environments will continue to become more complex. New services, new platform mechanics and new techniques emanating from data science will inevitably create perpetual change and development that enterprises will need to find a way of managing, all while mitigating the risks that come with innovating and scaling up.

Increasing operational efficiency and developing new capabilities is never a given. Organisations in every vertical must now task themselves with delivering virtualised cloud-native applications for new customer experiences in as fast, efficient and friction-free a way as possible.

Red Hat and Nutanix: delivering innovation

That ‘way’, that route, that facilitating direction is through Red Hat and Nutanix. Our partnership is precision-engineered to support the most data-critical applications, to accelerate time to business value and to deliver a better return on investment. We do this at the datacentre, on every user’s desktop environment, across every mobile device and onwards to address the surging ‘edge’ that now powers the Internet of Things (IoT).

By bringing Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift on Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure, organisations now have greater choice in how they deploy their virtual and containerized applications. 

For Red Hat customers looking to advance with Nutanix, we can help accelerate innovation through the Nutanix AHV expansion for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)/OpenShift. This same route is highlighted for Red Hat-sponsored CentOS customers looking to advance with Nutanix, given that CentOS is set to end of life in 2024.

For Nutanix customers looking to advance their innovation programmes, we work together to deliver Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP). For customers already innovating with Nutanix and Red Hat in their IT departments, there are a plethora of opportunities to reduce complexity using certified integration and support services between Nutanix and Red Hat,

Ideal infrastructure made easier

Working together, Nutanix and Red Hat have the power to simplify Red Hat environments with Nutanix HCI. We present a unique offering that delivers the ideal infrastructure for Red Hat (OpenShift/RHEL + Nutanix HCI) to build innovation through leadership.

Modern software application development requires an organisation has the means to automate processes and reduce complexity while supporting modern DevOps practices and maintaining security end-to-end. Through our partnership forged in cloud-native leadership, Nutanix and Red Hat enable a business to reap the benefits of cloud-native containerisation at scale, while also enabling the IT function to maintain and optimise its traditional virtual applications.

The combined expertise of Nutanix and Red Hat enables customers to manage any application - and that includes increasingly modern cloud-natives applications - anywhere, at any scale, with ease, scalability, choice and portability.