Nutanix .NEXT 2025 | Tobi Knaup, Nutanix & Kraig Hufstedler, Edward Jones

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More from Nutanix .NEXT 2025

Tobi Knaup

VP & GM, Cloud Native

Nutanix

Kraig Hufstedler

Team Leader - Platform As A Service

Edward Jones

play_circle_outline Edward Jones modernization journey to cloud native and Kubernetes

play_circle_outline Flexibility and consistency in operating across on-premises and cloud environments

play_circle_outline Operational efficiencies and improvements in managing platform with NKP automation

play_circle_outline Revolutionizing Portability and AI Workloads: NKP and NKE Innovations

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Tobi Knaup, Nutanix & Kraig Hufstedler, Edward Jones

Tobi Knaup

VP & GM, Cloud Native Nutanix

Kraig Hufstedler

Team Leader - Platform As A Service Edward Jones

Tobi Knaup, vice president and general manager for cloud-native at Nutanix, and Kraig Hufstedler, team leader for platform as a service at Edward Jones, sit down with theCUBE’s Bob Laliberte and Paul Nashawaty at Nutanix .NEXT to unpack the cloud-native transformation journey. From infrastructure to developer enablement, they bring fresh perspectives on reimagining enterprise IT through Kubernetes and modern app delivery.

Hufstedler shares how Edward Jones evolved its platform strategy from Mesosphere roots to a container-first architecture, empowering... Read more

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What led Edward Jones to start their modernization journey in 2018, particularly in terms of supporting their financial advisors and clients? add

What were the considerations and importance of maintaining consistency in operations when transitioning to the cloud platform? add

What has enabled your team to work more effectively managing the platform in a transparent and resilient way to your customers without introducing downtime at their platform level? add

What are the future initiatives and product alignment goals for D2iQ now that they are part of Nutanix? add

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Tobi Knaup, Nutanix & Kraig Hufstedler, Edward Jones

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Bob Laliberte

>> Hello, and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Nutanix . NEXT 2025. Hope you're having a great day. Awesome keynote we just saw, now we're going to get back to some of the live interviews. I'm Bob Laliberte, principal analyst at theCUBE Research. And I'm joined by my co-host, Paul Nashawaty, also principal analyst at theCUBE Research. And of course, John Furrier, who's off taking briefings right now to bring you the best coverage that we can. And I'm really excited for our next guests. We've got both Tobi Knaup, who is the VP and GM of Cloud Native at Nutanix, and we've got Kraig Hufstedler, who is the team leader, platform as a service, from Edward Jones. So, welcome gentlemen.

Kraig Hufstedler

>> Thank you. - Thanks for having us.

Bob Laliberte

>> All right. Well, let's get started.

Tobi Knaup

>> We wanted to focus this... Obviously, we've got a customer here. We want to focus a little bit on that journey to a modern environment, moving to cloud native, into Kubernetes. So let's get it started by talking about when your journey began, if you would.

Kraig Hufstedler

>> Absolutely, yeah. So at Edward Jones, we serve tens of thousands of financial advisors out on the field. We've got millions of clients. We really started our modernization journey around 2018. We were early Mesosphere customers, and we saw just a huge need for additional applications to support all of our clients and our branch teams. And so we really wanted to move to a more flexible developer platform where the developers could quickly and easily build out a microservice architecture and transition away from the larger VM- based applications.

Paul Nashawaty

>> It's really actually interesting because when I look at... The practice area that I cover is app dev, right? And when I look at the context of past, present, and future, there's not a lot of typically greenfield opportunities. It's always like there's bridging the gap between old and new. So I'm kind of curious, when you talk about containers, you talk about Kubernetes, you had some exploratory things that happened previously, and now you're moving into more mainstream and production environment. I guess the question will be for both of you, is what shifts the focus from containers and what were some of the early hurdles that you may have seen?

Kraig Hufstedler

>> Yeah. Scaling was a big thing for us. We didn't necessarily know, maybe over time, utilization of certain services and applications would grow. We wanted to start off small and be able to scale those out as we went. So the containerization really enables us to do that a lot more efficiently and optimized, and respond to those business needs a lot more quickly than with the VM-based platform.

Paul Nashawaty

>> How about interoperability between old and new? How did you bridge the gap?

Kraig Hufstedler

>> Yeah. So really, the networking layer, starting to try to transition traffic as it's-

>> It always about the network.

Bob Laliberte

>> It's the network. - It's the network. It's DNS at the

Kraig Hufstedler

>> end.

Bob Laliberte

>> Always. - It's all DNS.

Bob Laliberte

>> Excellent. Excellent. No, that sounds good.

Kraig Hufstedler

>> So I wonder if you could talk about some of the before and

Paul Nashawaty

>> after in that environment. You said you wanted to shift to make them more agile. What was the environment like prior to? And now that you've shifted, maybe you could talk a little bit about what that environment looks like today.

Kraig Hufstedler

>> Sure, yeah. So moving from VMs, where we're really oversized for what they were needed for, and very manual for deployments and moving workloads onto there, so moving into more of a CICD pipeline type environment. And allowing application teams to do their own load testing, do their own resource requirements. Rather than being locked in with a certain VM size, they can really get pretty granular and say, "We need our microservice to have so much compute, so much memory, so on and so forth."

Bob Laliberte

>> Excellent.

Paul Nashawaty

>> And Tobi, I want to shift the conversation to you. When we look at some of the discussions about this journey and where these modernization efforts are occurring, Nutanix Kubernetes Platform, it has a lot of robust, rich features in it, but there's also a lot of heritage to go along with that, right? It's not just from what's happening today, there's a lot of where it came from and where it's going. So maybe you could talk a little bit about the NKP and NKE and how that's all working together.

Tobi Knaup

>> Absolutely. So Kraig mentioned Mesosphere. For those watching who might not know Mesosphere, that's a company I co-founded. It was later renamed to D2iQ and then acquired by Nutanix in 2023. And so we've been doing containers for many years. We started in 2013. The company was called Mesosphere because we started with an open source project called Mesos, and then later shifted to Kubernetes. So we've been working with primarily large enterprises, like Edward Jones as well as government organizations on containers for many, many years. And what's important for that type of customer is you have to operate the platform often in a regulated environment or in an environment where you have other security constraints, corporate policies, and so forth. And so it's quite difficult to really get the benefit from Kubernetes, which is primarily agility for most organizations, and at the same time meet all these requirements, be compliant, be secure, and so forth. And so when we designed NKP, which is really the product that we had developed at our startup just rebranded as NKP now, we designed it with that type of customer in mind. So it's not just Kubernetes, it's a full end-to-end platform that checks all the boxes in terms of security and access control and observability, all those Day 2 management capabilities that are critical for running Kubernetes in such an environment. So organizations get that agility for their developers, but they can be compliant at the same time.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Absolutely. And I've been working with you for many years. As you know, this is a very hot topic. What we see in our research, 20% of respondents in our cloud native research indicate that it's critical that their applications are portable across any environments. And so having NKE, NKP in the environment really helps with that portability. But it's also... I think the counterpoint would be, well, what if you have organizations saying, "Well, I can do this myself. I don't need to have a platform. I know how to build it myself. " In my mind, the devils are in the details. What are your thoughts?

Tobi Knaup

>> Yes, a lot of details. I think with NKP, we really designed a product that brings together the best of two worlds. One being the do-it-yourself approach where people assemble their own stack from open source projects; and the other one being a fully supported enterprise platform, which is often pretty proprietary, right? With NKP, we try to combine those two. So it's an open platform, it's based on best of breed open source software. There are no proprietary APIs for customer applications, it's pure Kubernetes. But it's complete and fully supported, like an enterprise platform. So we try to combine that. And there's a lot of work that goes into cutting every release of NKP. NKP is built from over 30 different open source projects from within the CNCF. And those projects, they release at different times and they don't test with each other. So somebody needs to do that work, make sure it all fits together. That's all work that we do before we ship any NKP release, so customers don't have to do that.

Bob Laliberte

>> Excellent. Now, that's a great overview. Kraig, I want to turn back to you for a minute because when we started this off, talking about cloud native, most people associate cloud native with public cloud, but in your case, cloud native doesn't mean public cloud only. You started on-premises and then you're shifting to the cloud, which lends to any app anywhere. So I wonder if you could share a little bit about that journey, why you started on-premises, and then your journey to why you adopted the cloud later.

Kraig Hufstedler

>> So we're really focused on meeting the needs of our internal customers and our business teams, our application teams. And you might even be surprised, we found a lot of teams want or need to stay on-prem. So there's still a large demand and even a growing demand for that on-prem platform, so whether it's data gravity or being close to other services, things like that. So the flexibility that the NKP platform provides to stay on-prem and to really build a similar experience that they might have with a public cloud platform, the latest features, it's easy to use, we want to provide that in a very tailored environment, on- prem, to meet their needs.

Bob Laliberte

>> And how important was it, when you did go to the cloud, to have that consistent operating? As a former product marketing guy or product management person, I often had the principle of least astonishment, so when you're going to do something in a different realm, there's a consistency there. So I wonder if you could share your thoughts on that ability to have a common management across multiple different locations.

Kraig Hufstedler

>> Sure. Yeah, that's really powerful. We want our teams to pick where they go and not really worry about it too much beyond that. And so that's really a powerful thing to be able to provide to them.

>> Got it. - And that also addresses

Paul Nashawaty

>> what we see in our research, is skill gap issues.

Bob Laliberte

>> If there's, say, one platform to learn and you can use that and harmonize across the multiple environments, that's an important kind of feature. One of the things I saw at the keynote is the introduction of Google Cloud. I know that there was support for AWS, for DKP, and it was also support for Azure. Now with Google Cloud being brought into the mix, and on-prem, you're right. We see, again, in the research... I'm an analyst. I have to keep saying in the research because that's what I do. But at the end of the day, what we see is there's a lot of the flexibility of moving between burst capacity, development capacity, running the applications, to your point, to velocity of where the application's running for whatever reason. But that portability piece and having that skill to have one platform to do it is equally important, I believe. What would you say to that?

Kraig Hufstedler

>> Yeah. For us, flexibility is the key, right? So again, we're not seeing a ton of our internal clients that want to be in both yet. But as that need develops, we know that we've got the flexibility to do that, to provide that functionality if we need to.

Bob Laliberte

>> Got it. Got it. And I'm wondering if you... So I'm a big fan of operational efficiencies, leveraging that platform approach. I wonder if you could touch a little bit upon, during your journey, the before and after. How long it used to take you to do something versus now, with the more flexible, agile platform approach, what it takes you now and what benefits you're seeing from that.

Kraig Hufstedler

>> Sure, yeah. The biggest thing that comes to mind for me, obviously we've talked about making life easy for developers, we also want to keep life easy for our platform teams. And we've got upgrades and migrations almost continually, it feels like. And with the Nutanix NKP platform and the automation they've built around that, has really enabled our team to work more effectively managing the platform, and in a pretty transparent, resilient way to our customers. We don't want to introduce downtime at their platform level, and so we're able to do that using the tools that they've provided.

Bob Laliberte

>> Awesome. So being able to put together all the guardrails to let the developers run as fast as they want in between those, but you ultimately having control over the environment.

Kraig Hufstedler

>> Yeah, absolutely. - Yeah.

Paul Nashawaty

>> We're seeing also that development of applications is just exploding. And we're seeing that it's not the professional developer that's only developing applications, it's the citizen developers and people in the lines of businesses that are starting to develop. So there's just going to be an explosion of growth, especially with AI and everything coming into play. So, Tobi, I want to shift it a little bit. Now that D2iQ is part of Nutanix, and you've been in there for over a year now, roughly, there's a lot happening, how does the alignment and the future initiatives that you're looking at... Where are you going with with the product?

Tobi Knaup

>> Yeah. Joining forces with Nutanix was really great for us. I think it's a really strong 1 + 1 = 3 story, because I talked earlier about how we've been supporting large enterprises for many years, and in particular mission- critical workloads at large enterprises. Well, those mission-critical workloads almost always need advanced data capabilities. And how awesome that we've now joined forces with a company that was really built around hyperconverged storage in the first place. So that combination, it's actually one of the integrations we built after joining, is building an integration between NKP, the Kubernetes platform, and AOS, our core storage platform, so we can support these mission-critical apps, again, anywhere, because AOS now runs anywhere, and give customers these advanced capabilities for snapshotting and replication that they need to run their apps in a highly available way. At the same time, we saw it in the keynote, running anywhere is really central to what we do at Nutanix. And the Kubernetes platform still runs anywhere. It runs on bare metal, it runs on any cloud, it runs on public cloud, Kubernetes services, but of course also runs on the core Nutanix platform, on NCI. And it runs better on that platform, so you get these additional capabilities from AOS and so forth. Nutanix, with this acquisition, really made a huge move in the cloud native and in the containers, and that is going to continue. We saw today the announcement of Cloud Native AOS, which is really our core data platform running in containers, starting with Amazon's EKS and eventually on any bare metal server. So the journey towards more cloud native is continuing. And we're also doing that in support of the huge avalanche of AI workloads that are being built everywhere. We have our own AI platform, we partner with NVIDIA, and all that AI stuff is running on Kubernetes, so super exciting time.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Well, Tobi, there's a whole nother video session around this because I know that we could talk for hours on this alone. But that's really exciting. It's really exciting to see that you're meeting the client, the customers where they are. Your being at the forefront of where the trends are moving, and understanding those trends and impacting those trends, are also equally important.

>> Yeah. No, absolutely. I think I want to go back to you,

Bob Laliberte

>> Kraig, and think about... You've talked about your journey to date. What does the journey look like moving forward? And what were some of the things maybe that you saw during this morning that have intrigued you and that you want to investigate further, and you're going to incorporate into your roadmap going forward?

Kraig Hufstedler

>> For sure, yeah. On our roadmap is continued growth. We've got more and more need for compute at our firm, and we're looking at how we can deliver that to the developers, where it's easy for them to use. We're looking at event-driven auto-scaling, things like this, really trying to make our platform as resilient and flexible as possible. And so the Project Beacon stuff is really interesting to us, seeing that application platform really focused on those development teams. What of that could we make use of to really provide a value there?

Bob Laliberte

>> Awesome. Sounds like you got a lot of things to work on when you get back to the office. One last question before we let you go. Any advice for someone who's starting this journey or getting going on it? What would you tell them to do?

Kraig Hufstedler

>> Yeah, that's a great question. Tobi, what are your thoughts?

Tobi Knaup

>> Well, I think there's just a lot of exciting technology here, right? Kubernetes and related projects. And I think often the best qualities about something is also what can get us into trouble. So I think the best thing about Kubernetes and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation is the community. It's a very helpful community. If you're just getting started, you're going to find a lot of content online. You're going to have an amazing first experience with the technology. And so I've seen companies then, based on that experience, underestimate the complexity of actually running production systems. We still have to do all the things we always do for IT projects. We have to make sure it's secure, it's scalable, it's resilient, it's supported. And so my advice would be don't underestimate that. Get the help you need to train your team on these new technologies and work with a vendor like us to get the support and help reduce that complexity.

Bob Laliberte

>> Awesome. Sorry, did you have... Kraig, do you want to add?

>> Yeah. We really try to stay in touch

Kraig Hufstedler

>> with our developer community, with our other infrastructure teams, really do a lot of collaboration and listening. If we're not delivering the right value, we could go down a path that's disconnected from what our business actually needs and what our other partner teams actually need. And so we try to listen a lot.

>> Well, that's awesome.

Bob Laliberte

>> And everyone, you heard it here first, how to get started, what advice you have. So I thought that was great advice for organizations looking to get going. That's all the time we have for today. But I think, as Paul said, looking forward to some future sessions because there's certainly a lot more to unpack around these topics. So thank you for joining us, and I want to thank everyone for watching this session. Make sure you stay tuned. We've got a lot more coverage coming up of Nutanix. NEXT 2025.