Nutanix Inc. announced its new partnership with Google Cloud this week in the nick of time for the Nutanix .NEXT day one keynote in Washington, D.C., where speakers aptly zeroed in on multi-cloud. 

Multi-cloud and cloud in general are actually means to an end, not ends in themselves, Nutanix Chief Executive Officer and Chairman Dheeraj Pandey (pictured, left), told the audience. That end is mobility for distributed applications to flit among disparate environments if and when needed, Pandey explained, echoing Dell EMC Chief Executive Officer Micheal Dell’s message during Dell EMC World in May.

Nutanix’ hyperconverged infrastructure provides a flexible homebase for an enterprise-grade multi-cloud strategy, according to Pandey.

The current cloud craze parallels the dot-com boom of the 1990s in many ways, Pandey added. “Just the way you had commerce of goods, you have a commerce of computing that’s emerging,” he said. E-commerce companies were able to build businesses with “invisible warehouses.” Now the cloud is offering companies a way to operate from an invisible data center, Pandey stated.

Throwing out all on-premise infrastructure, however, may leave enterprises with their hands full of work and no suitable place to do it. An obvious example is the large SAP SE business applications that many enterprises rely on for crucial operations. These tend to have compatibility issues with cloud infrastructure, according to Pandey.

The laundry list of on-premise advantages that Pandey read from on stage should be familiar to anyone following the hardware companies trying to stay alive under the reign of Amazon Web Services Inc. and other public clouds.

Dell EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. and Lenovo Group Ltd. have all suggested that hybrid infrastructure is the way forward for enterprises and that they can’t do it without some on-premise hardware. Is this a likely story from companies with hardware inventory they must sell one way or another? Perhaps, but the facts about migrating to the cloud speak for themselves, in Pandey’s view.

“You can talk about cloud-native all day long, but it’s not there yet,” he said. For one thing, the existing skill sets of most DevOps and operations employees do not fit in the cloud-native paradigm. There are also a ton of things — like application issues, networking and security — for which enterprises need end-to-end customer support, Pandey added.

A truly stateless application (one that does not save client data) might be better off in the cloud 24-7. However, stateful applications (the type that do save client data) are not going to disappear over night. This is why replicating an application’s state so that it can move between on-prem and cloud environments easily is so key to hybrid infrastructure, Pandey explained.

Rolling with cloud and on-prem punches

Nutanix has doubled down on its hybrid cloud ambitions by partnering with Google Cloud on Xi Cloud Services to extend its hyperconverged environments onto the Google Cloud Platform, Pandey stated as he welcomed Diane Greene, senior vice president of Google Cloud, to the keynote stage.

Google understands that on-premise infrastructure has an enduring place in enterprises, Greene stated. “For all of the advantages of the cloud, some 95 percent of today’s workloads are still running in private data centers,” she said. Part of what’s made Google the world’s most profitable company is the infrastructure that underlies its technology, including its cloud, she told attendees. “When you use Google Cloud, you use the same secure infrastructure that protects all of Google,” she said.

Despite the 95 percent figure for current workloads, it is clear that most companies would like to advance further into the cloud, Greene stated. Nearly every information technology department in the world has made at least a start toward a public cloud strategy; executives are increasingly finding that fears about cloud security are largely unfounded and that cloud may offer cost savings over on-premise hardware, she added.

“The public cloud offers flexibility, the freedom to deploy new initiatives the instant they’re needed, rather than going through the budgeting and bulldozing process required to turn cornfields into new data centers,” Greene said.

Many enterprises choose to maintain some workloads on-premise also for the sake of flexibility and options. Google’s deal with Nutanix offers customers the ability to stretch and change along with their application and infrastructure needs.

“By partnering in areas around Kubernetes for workload orchestration and TensorFlow [Google’s machine learning library] for [Internet of Things] and other edge computing use cases — and having Nutanix Cloud Services on GCP [Google Cloud Platform] — we together offer customers state-of-the-art technologies and choice in how you use them,” Greene said.

Calming the rough seas in multi-cloud

One of the ways in which Google Cloud and Nutanix will meet in the middle, so to speak, was illustrated in an onstage demo with Aaditya Sood, senior director engineer and products at Nutanix. Sood and Pandey demonstrated on-screen how DevOps automation platform Calm.io makes multi-cloud deployment a point-and-click exercise.

Nutanix acquired Calm.io last year and ultimately aims to make it a full-on recommendation engine to help businesses run applications in different environments, Pandey explained. Calm’s application market interface allows users to deploy an application — for example, an app built on the Apache Hadoop big data framework — with simple visuals.

“We have the Hadoop application, we choose a name for it, decide which multi-cloud to go provision it on and that’s it,” Sood said, simultaneously completing each step on-stage.

Users can select apps in the Calm.io “app marketplace” without having to write thousands of lines of code with a developer tool like Puppet or Chef, Pandey stated.

“We have a ton of partner applications, open-source applications tested and certified by us, other third-party applications — and you can publish your internal applications to the marketplace,” Sood added.

While this particular demonstration took place on Nutanix’s Acropolis Hypervisor on-premise infrastructure, the procedure is virtually the same when shifting an application to the Google Cloud Platform, Pandey explained.

“In this case, what’s happening is the plugins that we have written are going and calling to GCP APIs [Application Program Interfaces] and saying, ‘Let’s go and figure out how to launch these virtual machines and these containers [a virtualized method for deploying distributed applications],” Pandey explained.

VMs and containers accommodate both stateful and stateless apps, which tend to use either respectively, according to Pandey. Going forward, Kubernetes container orchestration management may help not only to move some of these different elements, but mesh them, creating true hybrid applications, Pandey added.

This very task is on Calm.io’s agenda, currently, according to Sood. “What we are working on right now is how to fuse our stateful, classic enterprise applications and Kubernetes together in one,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial 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