Nutanix .NEXT 2017 - Calm and Marketplace

Another exciting announcement this week at the Nutanix .NEXT conference in Washington, D.C. is around Nutanix's new product called Calm, which came from their acquisition of Calm.IO in August 2016.

Nutanix Calm provides application automation and lifecycle management for the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform and public clouds, as well as self-service and governance, and hybrid cloud management.

So what is Calm and why is it needed? Managing applications has become increasingly complex. Consider these application automation and lifecycle management pain points:

• More app components and platforms leads to increased response time and finger pointing
• Knowledge silos and fragmented ownership leads to longer time to issue resolutions
• User expectations are for frequent releases, but these complexities are leading to longer release cycles

If you add a hybrid cloud element to these existing challenges, the problem becomes worse due to a lack of interoperability between disparate cloud platforms.

So how do you solve this problem? It boils down to two things:

1. Full stack automation
2. A single control plane for application orchestration

Full stack automation with a single control plane for orchestration is exactly what Calm is. 

Let's look at Calm at a high level.

Now let's break Calm down into its three main layers - Application Lifecycle Automation and Modeling, Self Service and Governance, and Hybrid Cloud Management.

Application Lifecycle Automation and Modeling

Application blueprints are an intuitive and visual way to model applications. Blueprints incorporate all elements, including VMs, configurations, and binaries. Blueprints are how you can drive repeatable provisioning of applications. 

Self Service and Governance

Nutanix Marketplace empowers self-service through one-click app provisioning, pre-integrated blueprints, and role-based access control. Imagine no longer having to spin up VMs for somebody else. You build the blueprint, give them access to deploy it, and they take over from there. Think of an application vending machine for your business!

Hybrid Cloud Management

Where do you want your application to reside today? On premises? No problem. In the cloud? Which one? You pick. The choice is yours. For some customers, this will come down to availability or data locality requirements. For others, this is going to come down to cost. Imagine being able to truly understand the real cost of your cloud providers. You can with Nutanix Calm. 

Calm is expected to be generally available in September 2017 and start with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) support. Future releases will include support for ESXi, Hyper-V, Azure, and containers. I understand Calm releases will happen quite quickly after the initial release, so I would expect to see these features before the end of 2017.

Enjoy the rest of .NEXT 2017!

I would like to thank Greg Smith and Chris Brown at Nutanix for sharing this content with the Nutanix Technical Champion community.