If you strip cloud strategy down to its essentials, you quickly notice that IT leaders are protecting three things. I am talking about continuity, autonomy and freedom of movement. Yet most clouds, private or public, quietly decimate at least one of these freedoms. You can gain elasticity but lose portability. You get managed services but have to accept immobility. And you can gain efficiency, but introduce concentration risk. Once the first workloads are deployed on a hyperscaler, many organizations underestimate the difficulty of reversing that decision later. And in some cases, they are aware of it and call it a strategic decision.

Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) repositions control. It extends your existing Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP) directly into the hyperscaler of your choice (AWS, Azure; or Google Cloud in tech preview) without requiring you to rewrite applications or adopt a new operational model. NC2 runs the same Nutanix stack on hyperscaler baremetal. Think of it as extending your private cloud to someone else’s cloud.

Workload Mobility

Most cloud migrations fail not because the target cloud is inadequate, but because the friction of moving virtual machines (VMs) is underestimated. Every dependency, every network pattern, every stored image becomes an anchor that slows down the migration. NC2 removes most of these anchors. Because the target environment is still Nutanix, your VM format, storage layout, operational tooling, and lifecycle management remain identical.

This creates a kind of reversible migration (aka repatriation). You are no longer forced to commit to one direction. You can burst, repatriate or rebalance depending on business needs, not platform constraints. The psychological barrier of “this migration better be worth it because we cannot undo it” disappears.

Cloud Exit

Cloud exit is a topic we have been discussing in our industry for some time now. IT decision-makers want to know if and how they could exit a cloud if necessary. Cost shocks, sovereignty concerns, regulatory pressure, or simple risk diversification can all trigger a reassessment.

What happens if our cloud dependency becomes a risk? What if we need to move? Do we have an exit plan?

NC2 is one of the few architectures where an exit is not a complicated multi-year re-architecture effort. Workloads running on NC2 can be moved back to an on-premises Nutanix cluster without replatforming and without importing cloud-native dependencies that are difficult to untangle. Platform symmetry makes the exit not only thinkable, but executable.

When your workloads run on NC2 in AWS or Azure, they do not inherit the hyperscaler’s native VM formats, storage layouts, or proprietary IAM constructs. They run inside the same Nutanix Cloud Platform you already operate on-prem. This means that the workloads you run in the cloud are the same as those you can run in your data center.

In many organizations, repatriation is seen as a point of failure. Something you only do when the cloud strategy “didn’t work out”. That framing is outdated. Repatriation is increasingly a proactive governance mechanism:

• Sovereignty changes? Move workloads home.
• Cost pressure rises? Bring certain workloads back on-prem during peak cost cycles.
• Predictable costs? Run static workloads privately but scale elastically via NC2.
• Vendor terms change? Shift to a different infrastructure model.
• GPU scarcity? Temporarily run training or inference workloads where you have capacity.

The cloud world has become multipolar. Many organizations are no longer choosing between “on-prem vs cloud”, but between multiple clouds like hyperscalers, European sovereign clouds, vertical-specific clouds, and dedicated regions.

Repatriation used to mean going home. With NC2, it can also mean going sideways:

• From Azure to a sovereign cloud provider
• From a hyperscaler to a private cloud built on NCP
• From one hyperscaler to another when commercial, regulatory, or technical factors shift
• From cloud to edge
• From cloud to hosted private infrastructure via a service provider (OVH for example)

In other words, it allows organizations to move workloads to the location that makes sense right now, not the one that made sense during a six-year-old strategy cycle.

Note: NC2 is fundamentally a sovereignty mechanism because it makes long-term commitments reversible.

Operational Relief for Small IT Teams

Every new stack, platform, or cloud demands new knowledge, new operational patterns, new tooling, and new troubleshooting domains. When a team of five suddenly needs to understand the details of AWS, Azure, Nutanix, Kubernetes, storage arrays, hypervisors, and cloud-native services, hybrid cloud becomes an unmanageable landscape.

Even though NC2 is not a managed service, it behaves like a consolidation layer that collapses the operational surface. The team does not need to master the specifics of hyperscaler virtualization models, instance families, cloud-native block storage semantics or proprietary IAM patterns, but they operate the same Nutanix environment everywhere. The public cloud stops being an alien planet with its own physics and becomes an extension of the data center they already know.

For small teams, the value is immense. They no longer split their attention between incompatible worlds. They do not require deep AWS or Azure certifications to run VMs in the cloud, nor do they need a dedicated cloud operations squad. No need to maintain multiple monitoring stacks, patching processes or network topologies. They simply work through Prism, with the same lifecycle management, upgrade workflows, automation, and storage patterns. Regardless of where the hardware resides.

In short, efficiency increases as complexity decreases.

Conclusion

Ultimately, NC2 is not just a technical extension of Nutanix into public cloud regions. Think of it as a structural correction to a decade of cloud decisions shaped by lock-in, fragmentation, and asymmetrical dependencies. It gives organizations the right to change their mind without paying a penalty for it. It reduces operational noise instead of amplifying it. It allows teams to stay focused on outcomes rather than infrastructure politics.