My Internship Experience: Nutanix

Hi, I am Abhisek Panda and I interned in the CALM team, Nutanix Inc., Bangalore in summer 2018.

It all started back in August 2017, during the on-campus internship season. The selection procedure of Nutanix comprised of 3 stages: a coding round; where one had to code up solutions to 2 questions in a limited time frame of 1 hour. The students who qualified this round had to go through 2 more rounds on the day of the interview. The first round required us to debug a C++ code snippet given on a sheet of paper. The final round was a personal interview round where I was asked about my projects and some questions on data structures and algorithms.

The team where you intern is allocated randomly, although some weight may be given to your personal preference if you mention it during interviews. I was placed in the CALM team at Nutanix. CALM stands for Cloud Application Lifecycle Management and our team dealt with automating the provisioning and management of applications deployed across various cloud platforms. My task was related to allocation of Virtual Machines. I had to write a plugin to automate the provisioning, power state updates (power on, off, restart) and deletion tasks of Virtual Machines which were based on VMware platform. Although this facility existed before, our team had developed a new module which made the entire procedure much more efficient than before, and I had to integrate my plugin with it. The entire project was based on mostly Golang and python. However, I felt that the most important skillset required for my task was familiarity with Linux command line tools. One particular thing which I loved about my work (among many others) is that my code was going to be used directly by customers of Nutanix to run their live applications. This gave a huge sense of responsibility and also served as a source of motivation to finish my task in a proper manner.

The work culture at Nutanix was absolutely amazing. Personally, I didn’t feel like I was working for a corporate company. People at Nutanix were smart, hard-working and were always willing to lend you a hand. You can approach anyone freely and everyone treats you just like your friend. The atmosphere was always cheerful. There were multiple team outings, and we also had an intern’s day out at Area83 which was quite memorable. There are no fixed office timings, so come and leave whenever you want, or simply work from home. There was no official dress code: I even went wearing shorts on multiple occasions.  There were adequate recreational facilities in the form of Table Tennis, carom, PS4, foosball, etc. For the more daring people, there was even a gym. The food was good and free. The pantries were full of coffee, chocolates, chips, noodles, soft drinks, etc. and guess what, they were absolutely free.

The city of Bangalore was awesome and the weather was mostly pleasant barring the first few weeks. If you are a food lover like me, you are in for a treat. You can find almost any cuisine you want and the clubs were awesome. Coorg, Ooty and Mysore are some of the famous destinations for a weekend trip. Or if you are a little more adventurous, you can always go to Wonderla.

Other teams at Nutanix were also involved in full stack development or database optimizations. Some interns were also involved in R&D departments concerning Machine Learning and Blockchain technology. However, Nutanix is best known for its innovations in systems and networking; so if you are fascinated by concepts like OS, networks or hardware level optimizations, Nutanix may be a perfect place for you.

I hope this helps to clear up some confusion regarding the work at Nutanix. In case of any questions, feel free to contact me.