NKP – Nutanix Kubernetes Platform – Whats All The Noise?

NKP is a centralized, enterprise-grade management solution designed to deploy, secure, and operate Kubernetes clusters across hybrid and multicloud environments (on-prem, public cloud, and edge).

NKP enables organizations to easily overcome Kubernetes Day 2 operational barriers, such as security, observability, reliability, upgradeability, backup and restore, policy management, and governance. This saves time and resources, enabling organizations to operationalize production-ready cloud-native environments in minutes rather than weeks or months.

NKP deployment options include Nutanix, VMware, bare metal servers, and a full range of public cloud, edge and air-gapped environments with or without Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure.

Together with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure, Nutanix Unified Storage and Nutanix Database Service, NKP Full Stack (NKP FS) delivers a consistent cloud-native platform for containers and VMs across public, private and hybrid multiclouds.

NKP Editions

	STARTER	PRO	ULTIMATE
	Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) Starter The fastest, easiest way to run Kubernetes on Nutanix.	Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) Pro An enterprise-ready stack ready to take applications in a cluster to production.	Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) Ultimate True fleet management for clusters running on-premises, in the cloud or anywhere.
What you get	The bare minimum to get started with Kubernetes on Nutanix AHV, including: Unlimited NKP clusters (NCI Pro and Ultimate) Upstream Kubernetes Cluster lifecycle management Air-gapped/dark site Nutanix CSI driver for persistent storage with Volume Groups and Files Storage Role-based access control and single-sign-on Load balancing and ingress services Rocky Linux OS only (provided by Nutanix)	Everything in Starter with platform services required for running modern applications on production, and: AI-ready (NVIDIA GPU Operator support) Bring your own operating system Runs anywhere: Nutanix, VMware, bare metal, AWS, Azure, and GCP Observability stack with dashboards, metrics, logs, and tracing Backup and restore Disaster recovery with NDK (on NCI) Service mesh NKP AI Navigator chatbot Serverless functions	Everything in Pro with the ability to operate at scale hybrid multicloud environments, including: Deploy, manage, and extend EKS and AKS cluster capabilities Kubernetes fleet management Multitenancy with support for dedicated and shared clusters Kubernetes Namespace as a Service GitOps for continuous deployment Centralized observability Cost management Application catalog NKP Insights analytics and anomaly detection Attach and manage CNCF Certified Kubernetes

  

NKP’s ecosystem includes a wide range of tooling and services critical for running Kubernetes in production. From automation and security to networking, observability, and storage, NKP covers all the bases – Readymade solutions, embedded into the ecosystem ready to use at the click of a button.

NKP Architecture

The NKP platform is formed of several key architectural components all tied together to

The management cluster serves as the central hub for NKP operations. It hosts the managers, which are controllers responsible for managing cluster and application operations.

• Cluster Managers are responsible for managing the lifecycle of clusters. The primary controller is the Cluster API controller, which supports the lifecycle management of Kubernetes clusters.
• Application Managers handle environment-level integrations such as authentication, authorization, and other tasks.

Nutanix is investing a lot of time and effort into the development of the NKP offering its recognized as a leader (e.g., Forrester Wave Q3 2025), it is positioned as a primary, secure platform for modernizing infrastructure and supporting AI workloads.

Go have a play with NKP on Nutanix ‘free’ test drive website - https://www.nutanix.com/one-platform