GÉANT nmaas

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 NRENs, institutions, research and development teams, and network and IT 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 and maintaining the central nmaas service instances with secure network access for production and test purposes.
Supporting users in using the platform and tools on the central nmaas service instances.
Supporting users in deploying self-hosted nmaas instances.
Maintaining tools added to the nmaas platform catalogue.
Supporting users in contributing their software to the nmaas platform catalogue.
Supporting users in designing and implementing new use-cases on top of the nmaas platform.
Maintaining nmaas open-source software repositories and public documentation websites.

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 users (e.g. organisations or teams).
Extensible Application Catalogue
Administrators can easily extend the catalogue with any containerised application using Helm charts. The platform already 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 configuration updates, version control, 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 user infrastructure.

Supported Use-Cases

nmaas serves as a general-purpose platform already powering multiple use cases across research and education:

Virtual NOC: Run your network monitoring application stack in the cloud with the nmaas Platform (managed production instance: https://vnoc.nmaas.eu).
Virtual Lab: Organization of online hands-on exercises made easy with the nmaas Platform (managed test instance: https://vlab.dev.nmaas.eu).