Nutanix will shortly make its Community Edition software available in the cloud.

The Reg has learned that the company will soon make it possible to implement the software in Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform cloud.

Nutanix sells hyperconverged server/storage/networking rigs based on Hyper-V, vSphere or its own KVM-based Acropolis hypervisor. The company's software is where it adds value, by making it simple to manage the fleet of VMs and apps running on its kit. That software layer overlays vSphere or Hyper-V, hiding them from view and – Nutanix says – improving their performance. The company then supports the whole shebang.

News of the Community Edition emerged in these pages last February and the code itself appeared as a beta in May. The beta will now continue in the cloud.

The Community Edition can run across one, three or four servers, providing they collectively offer at least four x86 cores. You'll also need at lest 200GB of flash storage and 500GB of spinning rust to get the code working. What you do after that is your business. When Nutanix CEO Dheeraj Pandey first told us about the software, he conceded it might cost Nutanix a sale or two, but figured the upside of exposure to developers, home lab operators and students was worth it.

Taking the Community Edition to the cloud looks like the same play: what does Nutanix have to lose by making it easier for people to play with the code? Home labs types and other footlers have plenty to gain: instead of needing hardware to play with, they'll be able to do the servers-by-the-hours caper if they fancy some time exploring Nutanix's kit

The cloudy version of the Community Edition will, we understand, include features baked into Nutanix's Acropolis. Those signing up can therefore expect high availability for VMs, erasure coding to protect data and a technology preview of self-service file restore from snapshots.

Nutanix has enabled hybrid environments with its code in AWS for a while, so adding the community edition to the cloud won't be a stretch. ®