Platform9 Offers Kubernetes Orchestration as a Managed Service

Platform9 at DockerCon this week has unveiled a container management platform called Platform9 Managed Kubernetes. It’s delivered as a managed service, so businesses can offload the management, troubleshooting, and upgrades involved with running an orchestration solution.

This solution, which is in beta, builds on the popular Kubernetes container orchestration solution by making it simpler to manage and providing service-level guarantees. Platform9 Managed Kubernetes is also noteworthy in that it supports both containers and virtual machines, said Madhura Maskasky, co-founder and vice president of product at Platform9, which she founded in 2013 with other former VMware engineers.

“As developers consider containers for building next generation applications, Kubernetes is the leader among a new class of container management frameworks they consider, because it provides them with features such as service discovery, load balancing, and application lifecycle management,” Platform9 explains. “However for operators supporting mission-critical workloads, there are a host of other requirements including single sign on, role-based access control, and multi-tenancy support for policy and governance, as well as persistent storage, isolated networking, and image management. Further, uptime and stability of the deployment are critical.”

Platform9 Managed Kubernetes addresses all of the requirements listed above. Platform9 has 50 active customers around the world. It caters to SaaS companies, software companies, media companies, and recently also began to target the financial and health care verticals, and mid to large sized service providers.

Kubernetes, which was created by Google, is a container orchestration solution. In fact, it’s considered the leading container orchestration solution. (Orchestration in this context involves turning on and off of containers, assigning apps to containers, ensuring that when containers die new ones are spun up to keep apps running, and stuff like that.) Docker also has an orchestration solution, which is known as Swarm; in fact, Docker announced today that it has integrated Swarm functionality into its core product with the 1.12 release of Docker Engine.