Platform9, the first company to provide open-source SaaS managed solutions for private and edge clouds including Kubernetes and OpenStack, today announced key additional building blocks in delivering the next generation SaaS managed Kubernetes experience.

New features include the industry's first managed Calico networking with API access, an application wizard for automated deployment of bare-metal Kubernetes clusters, and enhanced cluster monitoring and observability that provide better insights into all aspects of cluster behavior. All of these features are now available, including support for Kubernetes release 1.17, for all Platform9 customers of the Freedom, Growth and Enterprise plans.

"Our latest platform release provides an even more efficient and streamlined SaaS managed Kubernetes experience for container application management with no operational burden," said Madhura Maskasky, Platform9 co-founder and VP of Product. "Significant additions in this release continue to transform Kubernetes environments through a managed platform that offers ease-of-use, elimination of operational complexity, and infrastructure flexibility."

Platform9 is currently seeing unprecedented demand for its fully managed Kubernetes solutions as more organizations transition to and expand their Kubernetes initiatives. In just over three months since the launch of the Freedom plan -- the industry's only fully-managed free multi-cloud/on-premises Kubernetes service -- the company has more than 1600 signups and over 100 Clusters spanning AWS, Azure, and bare-metal OS environments. The team has found that large enterprise customers have been test-driving the Freedom Tier solution entirely on their own before making critical purchasing decisions.

"The Platform9 managed Kubernetes solution has provided immediate benefits in simplifying Day 2 operations, accelerating deployment of open-source innovations, and significantly lowering operational costs," said Ravi Ravichandran, Juniper Networks, VP Cloud platform and DevOps.

Highlights of the new Storage, Calico CNI, and extended Kubernetes support include:

• Calico CNI enhanced cluster configuration: Platform9 now provides the industry's only secure and remotely accessible API for Calico, enabling an extremely simplified customer interface. Businesses with latency-sensitive applications and globally distributed clusters can leverage Calico in multiple configurations and environments, including BGP.
• CSI support: Development teams containerizing applications can now use the full list of available and popular CSI Drivers, including VMware and Pure Storage.
• 1.17 Kubernetes version support: All customers, including those currently using AWS and Azure public cloud environments, are assured of all the newest Kubernetes functionality with no rollback or defeaturing.
• ETCD backup: This key capability allows better disaster recovery, regularly scheduled remote backup, and point to point updated backup file transmission.

"Kubernetes and cloud-native computing in general are changing the game for enterprise infrastructure, and Platform9 reduces the complexities of manageability and deployment, and provides operational ease of use," explained Jason Bloomberg, founder and president of analyst firm Intellyx. "Platform9's outsourced control plane and SaaS management model deliver on the promise of the Kubernetes platform."

Cluster management and monitoring enhancements include:

• Cluster Management
  • New real-time cluster health & build tracking solves operational pain for DevOps and IT Ops teams. The Node Health page shows clusters being built, self-healing and running upgrades, enabling real operations team planning versus heuristics and guesswork.
  • Platform9's new user experience supports cluster creating wizards. Developers, DevOps and IT teams no longer have to manually build bare-metal and virtual machine-based clusters.
  • New support for building of basic and advanced physical and virtual machine clusters directly from the CLI provides extreme flexibility & faster time to implement clusters.

• Cluster Monitoring and Observability
  • Developers, diagnosing root cause behaviors and anomalies, can now use built-in Prometheus and Grafana to track and observe every cluster.
  • This provides insight into every aspect of the Kubernetes cluster, including a set of rules that produces alerts for the most critical of Kubernetes infrastructure, enabling simplified edge management.