Learn the platform contract—and the cloud beneath it.

Nais is an application platform built around autonomous teams that develop, deploy and operate their own products. It supplies a secure runtime and self-service building blocks so each team does not have to assemble a Kubernetes and cloud platform from scratch. The name originally meant NAVs Application Infrastructure Services; the Nais community is working towards letting the N mean Norwegian.

Nais is not a separate cloud provider. Each cloud environment is a Kubernetes cluster on Google Kubernetes Engine, while selected capabilities come from Google Cloud, Aiven and platform-operated components. The developer-facing contract is intentionally higher-level: teams primarily use Nais manifests, Nais Console, GitHub Actions and platform APIs.

That abstraction changes who handles complexity, not whether production responsibility exists. This learning path focuses on both sides of the contract: what the platform automates and what the product team must still understand, decide and operate.

If you are deciding between the two operating models, begin with Google Cloud directly or through Nais?. It compares benefits, limits, support responsibilities and PostgreSQL outages before the technical modules begin.