As cloud technology matures, services and applications become vastly more simple to consume and deploy. At the heart of this trend is the notion of a cloud operating system upon which these applications are controlled and managed. Aaditya Sood (pictured, right), senior director of engineering and products at Nutanix Inc., described how his recently acquired company Calm.io, where he was chief executive officer, is bringing this level of simplicity and control to the Nutanix cloud offerings.

“Calm is a control plane at the application layer. It’s how you build a multi-cloud, hybrid cloud technology together and manage the entire lifecycle, compliance, governance, all of these things together,” Sood said.

Sood and Binny Gill (pictured, left), chief architect at Nutanix, spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during this week’s Nutanix .NEXT Conference in Washington, D.C. (* Disclosure below.)

Interoperability between applications

The key to building a robust operating system is to ensure compatibility with any infrastructure it sits on top of and enabling developers to build applications within it, according to Sood and Gill.

“The message is that we are developing a marketplace and bringing Calm to the picture. We are providing an operating system that can run on any hardware, hardware meaning any cloud, any hypervisor and so on,” Sood said. 

In order to ensure the applications built in the operating system are all robust, the application program interfaces’ connections between them must all be completely interoperable and compatible, Gill and Sood explained.

“Any time an OS is developed, after some point you have to talk about the standardization of APIs on top of this OS … this new cloud operating system is actually asking for standardization of APIs so that the applications built on top of it can enjoy a guaranteed stable API that can be ported across various hardware and cloud,” Gill said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Nutanix .NEXT US 2017 event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Nutanix .NEXT US. Neither Nutanix Inc. nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE