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.
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.
- Supporting users that contribute their software to the nmaas system.
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 online lab environments for education, training, and experimentation.
Benefits
Reduces complexity and manual effort of application deployment and underlying infrastructure maintenance.
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.
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 elements.Multi-Tenant Isolation
Each tenant operates in its own secure namespace, ensuring full separation of resources and configurations between organisations or teams.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 used as a managed service via GÉANT or self-hosted on institutional infrastructure.
