Platform9 Announces Managed Kubernetes with SaaS GitOps Engine

Platform9 announced a number of new enterprise features that greatly eliminate operational complexities in managing multi-cluster and multicloud Kubernetes deployments. Key advances include the Profile Engine for template-based cross-cluster governance, IDE enhancements for fast access to running workloads, user-specified upgrade strategies, KubeVirt enhancements, and CIS Benchmarking compliance.

“Focused on multicloud governance, security, and ease-of-use features, this product release further simplifies Kubernetes by introducing new developer-focused features that enable instant access to any running Pod, Deployment, or Service,” said Madhura Maskasky, Platform9 co-founder and VP of Product. “The result is tangible and significant productivity gains through the simplicity of consistent single-pane-of-glass management and governance.”

With Platform9 Managed Kubernetes (PMK), users can easily create upstream Kubernetes clusters using the SaaS platform, on bare metal, AWS, and Azure IaaS layer, and with a few clicks, import clusters from EKS, AKS, and GKE.

Featured updates in this release include:

GitOps Profile Engine: Profile Engine enables GitOps style automation in multicloud environments by allowing administrators to define cluster configurations as desired state templates, and then deploy those to any target cluster. The deployment process updates the target cluster’s state to ensure it conforms to the profile. Comparison and drift analytics are built in to detect changes from compliant configurations so users can take appropriate corrective actions. By treating cluster configuration via declarative profiles, which can be treated as versioned source code, it is easier to provision multiple clusters for new applications or teams, to rebuild clusters, or to compare clusters and analyze differences. Furthermore, the Profile Engine ensures consistency, compliance, and standardization to combat sprawl, security holes, and a lack of policy conformance.

Upgrade Strategies: Customers want flexibility in how and when they upgrade their clusters in production. This release provides three options to upgrade:

Sequential: Worker nodes are upgraded in sequence in a rolling fashion
Parallel Percentage: Users can specify a percentage of nodes to be upgraded simultaneously
Batch: Users can manually select nodes

Storage Classes/PV/PVC/CSI Drivers: This release provides comprehensive drill-down views of objects across all cluster types, providing unparalleled visibility into storage details directly in the UI. Adding a new storage class is easy with the auto-detection of CSI drivers for one-click deployment of persistent storage.

KubeVirt Enhancements: Platform9 Managed KubeVirt enables users to run both legacy VM applications and containers on a fully managed unified platform. This new release introduces a management UI and wizard-based configuration and provisioning so that users can easily create VMs, attach disk(s), start/stop VM instances, view instance details, and much more all with a few clicks.

CIS Benchmark: Platform9 is now CIS Benchmark compliant, extending our security posture that includes SoC2 compliance, encrypted networking between Clusters, Pods, and Nodes, encryption at-rest, and ZeroTrust SaaS architecture.

Other significant updates include a 10x improvement in UI performance and responsiveness; drill-down details on storage, pods, deployments, and services views; logs, events across all cluster types; support for Kubernetes 1.21 and containerd.

All of these advances are paired with Platform9’s unique SaaS-based closed-loop automation–including deployment, monitoring, alerting, self-healing, and proactive troubleshooting and support–that guarantees 99.9% multicluster, multicloud SLA. Platform9’s 100% CKA certified solution architects and customer success teams operate as an extension of customers’ SRE and DevOps teams providing in-depth K8s on-demand Kubernetes expertise and proactively resolving issues 24/7/365.

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