Platform9, a startup founded by a group of former VMware engineers , on Tuesday added a managed Kubernetes service to complement its existing OpenStack product.
The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company delivers the Linux container orchestration technology, first developed at Google, through a Software-as-a-Service model, much like it does with the OpenStack cloud operating system. The Kubernetes product was first introduced at last year’s DockerCon.
The new offering puts in the hands of partners a portable, turnkey solution for deploying the container technology that’s often hampered in the channel by its operational complexity, said Sirish Raghuram, Platform9’s CEO.
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While OpenStack and VMware solutions are popular among tech companies and retailers that run virtualized workloads, applications built in the last year, or that will be built in the next, are often taking advantage of containers for their scalability, fault-tolerance and cost reductions, Raghuram said.
Many existing and net-new Platform9 customers are looking to run container deployments side-by-side with OpenStack virtual machines, he said.
„OpenStack and Kubernetes are similar in some ways,“ Raghuram told CRN. „Both are distributed systems with a large community of developers, which means new challenges for IT operations that want to run them. “
Enterprise IT teams have „never had to manage distributed systems like these. Upgrading, troubleshooting, monitoring and hardening tends to be a lot of work. Not everybody has Google engineers. “
Platform9’s Kubernetes product, in fact, feels very similar to Google Container Engine, which is a fully-managed container orchestration service. While Google offers „one of the best implementations of Kubernetes out there,“ Raghuram said, it only runs on Google’s cloud.
The Platform9 offering is „exactly like Google Container Engine, but works for any infrastructure or cloud of the customer’s choice, decoupling from underlying infrastructure. “ That includes on-premises infrastructure and other cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, enabling a multi-cloud strategy.
A close integration with AWS is already available that takes advantage of native capabilities like auto-scaling and load balancing, with work underway for Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.<\/p>\n