Introduction to Project Beacon

At our recent .NEXT in Chicago, we announced Project Beacon . A multi-year project which will see Nutanix completely reimagine how data-centric platform services are architected and delivered to customers. How? Liberating data services from the underlying infrastructure on which they run enables true application portability.

What are data-centric platform services?

In short, data-centric platform services, such as Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS), are popular with developers and ops teams as they allow for easy, fast access to the data processing capabilities required to support modern applications without managing and maintaining the services. The benefit of data-centric platform services is better developer productivity, easier database and data services management, and a much quicker time to market for new software products and features.

We know that today’s customers either have or plan to adopt hybrid multicloud architectures because they want to take advantage of the flexibility needed to run different workloads and applications on-premises, in a colo facility, public cloud, or at the edge. Why? Because customers want cost flexibility, compliance, and better latency.

But, while businesses want ease of application portability and access to powerful data-centric platform services - right now, it's a one or the other, not both, scenario. Let's take containers and Kubernetes as an example. They have made applications more portable, but the platform services we use to manage, process, and analyse application data are still linked to a specific cloud. To get the data services you need, you must adopt disparate services, software, and processes. It gets messy.

For instance, a development team running an application for US-based customers in containers on AWS and using Amazon RDS to manage customer data might want to extend the application to Europe. Still, the EU has strict data sovereignty laws. Lifting a container-based application and putting it in a European-based AWS data centre is easy enough, but you can’t take Amazon RDS with you. Instead, you will need to deploy new databases in Europe and rework the application to work with these databases. It’s all time, cost, and duplicated effort.

Extending data-centric platform services

This is where Project Beacon comes in. Our vision is to ensure the same data-centric platform services are available in the major public clouds, private data centres, and colo facilities and that they are managed from a single control plane.

What Project Beacon unearths is the capability to run applications wherever you need to and have ubiquitous access to the data services developers require to build the best applications they can without having to rewrite aspects for different use cases continually.

To start, Nutanix will focus on making Nutanix Database Service, our DBaaS offering, natively available on each of the public clouds via cloud marketplaces and running on public cloud infrastructure. Followed by expanding other data services like data streaming, messaging, caching, and AI/ML.

It’s a big but important step, and I encourage you to sign up for updates on Project Beacon and participate in the beta process.