Hybrid Cloud Integration Requires Unified VM and Kubernetes Management

Key Quotes

"Fundamentally the reason that you want to learn to adopt containers is because developers who are pushing code to containers end up being able to push more frequently and the example I like to give people for that is think back to the early 2000s for those of you who can remember the early 2000s when the state of the art for search was Altavista and the state of the art for maps was MapQuest and the state of the art for mail email was Hotmail right with with a 10 megabyte limit in your inbox and then this company comes out of the blue and says you know what we're going to revolutionize all these different things at once right we're going to revolutionize all of a sudden Google search comes out and blows everything away Google Maps so much better than MapQuest or Yahoo Maps and you know look at Gmail unlimited storage and how do they do that the reason they were able to do it was because they had they were moving they were innovating so much faster and one of the big reasons was that they had adopted containers they were able to innovate quickly."

Dan Ciruli explains that the primary driver for adopting containers is the ability to increase the frequency of software deployments. He illustrates this by contrasting early 2000s internet services with Google's rapid innovation, attributing much of Google's speed to their early adoption of container technology. Ciruli argues that this faster innovation cycle is a fundamental benefit for any organization, regardless of scale.

"The reason you have VMs is because you have VMs right and and the fact is that moving to containers writing code for containers isn't fundamentally very difficult but when you have an application that's already running changing it so it can be adopted to run in containers that can be quite difficult and this is the thing that I think we even we in the cloud native community were blind to for a while because we kept saying well just re architect your application and the fact is that when you re architect an application it can take a long time it can take a lot of work and it fundamentally is the same application it doesn't give you any business value you can operate it differently and maybe you could move more quickly but maybe this is an old application that doesn't need to move quickly."

Dan Ciruli addresses the continued relevance of Virtual Machines (VMs) by highlighting the difficulty of re-architecting existing applications for containers. He points out that while writing new code for containers is manageable, modifying legacy applications can be a significant undertaking that may not yield immediate business value. Ciruli suggests that some older applications may not require the rapid iteration that containers enable.

"When things are done well you don't have silos like that between the infrastructure on which things are deployed and the simple example is you've got an app that's running in a container that is needs to communicate well with one of your existing applications in a VM ideally you can run those in such a way that you've got the same networking between them and you can write a single network policy in one system that says yeah I want that thing to be able to talk to this thing and vice versa protect them both you know don't open up everything protect them but but let them do that."

Dan Ciruli describes an ideal scenario for integrating containerized and VM-based applications, emphasizing the elimination of infrastructure silos. He explains that when done correctly, both types of applications can reside within a unified networking environment. Ciruli suggests that this allows for a single, consistent network policy to manage communication and security between containers and VMs, ensuring controlled access.

"The problem with IPs in Kubernetes land is that IPs in Kubernetes land tend to be ephemeral right right things can things can move in you know a pod with a VM you when there's when there's a new piece of software when that that VM gets upgraded or patched or something you you tend to do that on that running piece of software your IP stays constant in in Kubernetes land when when there's a new container you you don't update your container you spin up a new one you tear down the old one right that by definition that could land somewhere else could have a different IP and then you can get into things like well okay well where everything's going to go through an egress and we're just going to whitelist the egress but then you're having the right again different network policy so now you've got some network policy that's that's doing your maybe your l2 or l3 but then you've got something else internal to the cluster that's doing your l7 and saying oh is this particular thing allowed to talk here and and it just gets complex."

Dan Ciruli explains the complexity of IP address management when communicating between Kubernetes and VMs. He notes that Kubernetes pods, unlike traditional VMs, are ephemeral, meaning their IP addresses can change frequently as new containers are spun up and old ones are torn down. Ciruli highlights that this dynamic nature necessitates intricate network policies, often involving multiple layers of management (L2, L3, and L7), which can become difficult to maintain.

"One thing that that we're trying to solve is you know I said before you know a huge percentage of the of the kubernetes that runs in the world runs on hyper scalers and and the reason that is is that the hyper scalers made it really easy to get a kubernetes cluster effectively at a button click or an api call if you're automating right and to get it and have it be secure have you know upgrades that to be something you don't have to worry about you don't even think about it it just it just happens when you're in the cloud the reason why kubernetes hasn't taken off as much on prem is that that wasn't true right on prem you had to do a lot of care and feeding you were in charge of that kubernetes cluster."

Dan Ciruli identifies a key challenge in on-premises Kubernetes adoption: the difficulty of provisioning and managing clusters compared to cloud-based solutions. He explains that hyper-scalers offer a simplified, automated experience for obtaining secure and up-to-date Kubernetes clusters. Ciruli contrasts this with on-premises environments, where organizations have historically faced significant "care and feeding" responsibilities for their Kubernetes infrastructure.

"The thing that that really differentiates Nutanix is that for most enterprises they think about one vendor for virtualization one vendor for storage and a different vendor for for container management and Nutanix while we really play nice we can interoperate on any of those tiers we can use anybody's storage anybody's hypervisor anybody's container management we do offer them all in one package and so we do have customers who say yeah I'll take that because it's got everything I need and and there's no other company that can say yeah we we really do all those things well."

Dan Ciruli highlights Nutanix's unique value proposition by contrasting it with the typical enterprise approach to infrastructure. He explains that most companies manage virtualization, storage, and container management through separate vendors. Ciruli states that Nutanix offers a unified package that integrates these components, providing a comprehensive solution that other companies cannot match.