Platform9 announced new platform capabilities that make it easier for cloud-native development and operations teams to build, scale, and operate apps and Kubernetes clusters in the cloud, on-premises, and at the edge.

While Ops teams wrestle with the complexities of operating production Kubernetes deployments, application developers need to learn many essential elements of Kubernetes to run even the simplest of apps. This steep learning curve and new patterns to build and scale cloud-native applications can slow adoption of Kubernetes and time to market.

"One of the biggest challenges cloud-native developers face is understanding how applications run at scale in microservices architectures," said Chris Jones, Platform9 group product manager. "We focused almost exclusively on this issue in our latest release. To help solve the complexity, we built a brand-new developer IDE and launched ArgoCD-as-a-Service. Our goal is to dramatically improve developer productivity with capabilities that make it very easy to build, troubleshoot, and scale cloud-native apps."

New self-service features greatly improve developer productivity

• New IDE provides simplified in-context views to pods, logs, events, and more: Developers now have access to pod status, logs and Kubernetes events, all kept in-context and automatically mapped to their related objects. No more guessing which pod is related to which service. To quickly tweak the manifest, the YAML is available to be edited and updated directly in the cluster. The new IDE experience supports Platform9 native clusters and clusters imported from EKS, AKS, and GKE.
• Building and scaling apps easily with ArgoCD: Administrators simply need to connect their Git Repository, then start leveraging ArgoCD's automation to manage application lifecycle. Applications can be deployed, scaled, upgraded, and removed without any interaction from cluster administrators and without provisioning unnecessary access to developers. As a result, developers consume Continuous Delivery as-a-Service on any Kubernetes, Platform9 Native, imported EKS, AKS, or GKE, and 100% external clusters.

New features boost operator productivity

• Zero setup for ArgoCD: Because ArgoCD runs as an application within the Platform9 SaaS Management Plane, all Platform9 managed clusters are automatically connected to ArgoCD, enabling zero-setup continuous delivery - no installation, configuration, or integration is ever necessary. Cluster admins can enable developers to deploy applications without running Kubectl Apply or Helm Install ever again.
• Simplified management of imported EKS, AKS, and GKE clusters: The new External Cluster Operator (ECO) creates a secure communication tunnel between EKS, AKS, or GKE clusters and Platform9. Operators can now leverage Platform9's managed in-cluster monitoring and use ArgoCD to quickly provision apps to any hyperscale cluster.
• Industry's first and most robust remote monitoring: Catapult Remote Monitoring enhances Platform9's existing SaaS capabilities, providing over 50 alerts. The remote monitoring covers key elements such as etcd, Kubernetes API Server, Nodes, Workloads, CNI, and Platform9 managed add-ons. The new alerts are sent to DevOps/SREs teams via their system of choice. Additionally, alerts impacting key infrastructure are immediately escalated to Platform9 support 24/7 to proactively resolve issues. Catapult Remote Monitoring is included for all users (Freedom, Growth, and Enterprise).

This release includes the general availability of Managed KubeVirt, which makes it easy to run virtual machines (VMs) alongside containers on a single unified platform. In addition, the Managed Bare Metal now includes Metal Kubed in technical preview.

Along with these updates, the user interface (UI) has been completely overhauled.

"This next-generation UI was entirely redesigned to provide a modern and seamless user experience, with the goal of simplifying operating cloud-native applications in real-time," said John Ruddell, Platform9 Principal UI/UX engineer. "We revamped how users navigate between multiple SaaS products with an application switcher in the sidebar. The entire system is dynamic: All the Kubernetes objects such as Pods, Services, and ReplicaSets are mapped together and data loading now exposes errors inline for each dashboard/view."

ArgoCD-as-a-Service is currently in early access preview for DevOps teams to kick-start their GitOps automation journey. ArgoCD is automatically connected to clusters that are managed by Platform9. Users deploy an application, which is automatically synchronized to the Git repository.