nmaas – Platform for On-Demand Application Deployment
(formerly: GÉANT Network Management as a Service)
nmaas is an open-source, multi-tenant orchestration platform for automated deployment and management of containerised applications in the cloud or on private infrastructure. It enables institutions, research organisations, and service providers to quickly deploy and operate a wide range of applications through a unified, self-service portal.
Supported Use-Cases
nmaas serves as a general-purpose platform already powering multiple use cases across research and education:
Virtual NOC: deployment and management of network-monitoring and operations tools.
Virtual Lab: automated provisioning of lab environments for education, training, and experimentation.
Key Capabilities
Self-Service Deployment:
Users can select applications from a curated catalogue and deploy them into isolated tenant environments with a few clicks, without requiring direct access to Kubernetes or infrastructure layers.Multi-Tenant Isolation:
Each tenant operates in its own secure namespace, ensuring full separation of resources and configurations between organisations or departments.Extensible Application Catalogue:
Administrators can easily extend the catalogue with any containerised application using Helm charts. The platform supports a wide spectrum of applications — from development tools and databases to collaboration systems and monitoring solutions.GitOps-Driven Lifecycle Management:
Each deployed application is backed by a dedicated Git repository, enabling version control, configuration tracking, and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) workflows.Scalability and Flexibility:
nmaas can be deployed as a managed service (e.g., via GÉANT) or self-hosted on institutional infrastructure. It supports both cloud-native and hybrid deployments, adapting to diverse operational environments.
Benefits
Reduces complexity and manual effort in application deployment.
Provides consistent, reproducible, and auditable environments.
Enables faster innovation through self-service access to ready-to-use applications.
Offers flexibility between managed and self-hosted operation models.
GÉANT’s nmaas service
nmaas is offered as a service that includes:
- Providing, managing and maintaining the infrastructure of the nmaas service portal, platform and selected tools.
- Supporting users in using the system, and the selected tools for monitoring their networks via nmaas.
- Supporting users that contribute their software to the nmaas system
Find out more about the service...
