Platform9 Introduces Infrastructure-Agnostic Managed Kubernetes Service

Among the many approaches seen in the OpenStack arena, OpenStack as a service is emerging as an interesting choice. Platform9, which focuses on OpenStack-based private clouds, has steadily announced new releases of its Platform9 Managed OpenStack, which is a SaaS-based solution with integration for single sign-on (SSO) solutions.

Now, the company has announced the availability of its Managed Kubernetes service, which it bills as "the industry's first infrastructure-agnostic, SaaS-managed offering." Unlike legacy software distribution models, Managed Kubernetes is deployed and managed entirely as a SaaS solution, across on-premises and public cloud infrastructure.

Platform9 has also also introduced Fission, a new, open source, serverless framework built on Kubernetes. "These offerings feature a drastically simplified operational and consumption model that eliminates the steep learning curve currently associated with Kubernetes, and allow DevOps and IT teams to focus on solving core business problems." Indeed, Kubernetes does have a learning curve.

According to Platform9:

"Kubernetes has emerged as the standard for container orchestration and microservices, but projects are often hampered by the prohibitively steep learning curve required to effectively use Kubernetes, and the technical complexity needed to fully integrate and manage production Kubernetes environments. Platform9's Managed Kubernetes service is fully integrated, truly infrastructure-agnostic and introduces a much faster, more manageable way to leverage Kubernetes. It saves considerable time and capital for DevOps and IT teams, allowing them to integrate across any combination of cloud platform or on-premises infrastructure without re-engineering a single line of code -- or worrying about backend configuration and maintenance."

 "SaaS-managed delivery makes Kubernetes accessible to a much larger audience at a time when many development teams are committing to microservices as their cloud-native development paradigm," said Sirish Raghuram, chief executive officer at Platform9. "We have built our reputation on our OpenStack-as-a-service offering, which remains a core focus -- and propelled 400 percent customer growth for Platform9 in 2016 alone. While enterprises will be running virtualized workloads on OpenStack for years to come, though, there's growing demand for platforms that offer a choice of virtualization, microservices or both. Microservices in particular require a more intuitive, managed approach that reduces time-to-value for Kubernetes projects and work on any choice of infrastructure: on-premises, in the cloud or across multiple clouds."

"Platform9 Managed Kubernetes is a positive addition to the ecosystem in helping make Kubernetes run anywhere," said David Aronchick, Kubernetes Product Manager at Google. "This illustrates the innovation and momentum from the thousands of contributors to the project that are moving Kubernetes forward as the standard for cloud-native and containerized applications."

"A significant challenge with running containerized applications in production is managing the container orchestration software stack. For instance, engineers need to watch upgrade of the Docker runtime or the cluster orchestration agent to ensure that there is no downtime for production applications during upgrade," said Kuldeep Chowhan, cloud architect at Expedia. "Managed Kubernetes provides significant value to companies that are serious about use of containers because it eliminates the complexity of managing the container orchestration layer, while running on any infrastructure."

Managed Kubernetes is offered as a peer service to Platform9 Managed OpenStack, giving customers the freedom of choice across both. Microservices developers can use Kubernetes independent of OpenStack, virtualized application developers can use OpenStack, and IT/Operations can manage across both frameworks through a single management pane. 

For a more detailed technical overview of Platform9 Managed Kubernetes, you can click here.