Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

kvm

Startup intro: ZeroStack

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A couple of months back one of the people I used to work a lot with in the DRS team reaches out to me. He told me that he started a company with some other people I knew and we spoke about the state of the industry and some of the challenges customers faced. Fast forward to today, ZeroStack just came out of stealth and announced to the world what they are building and an A round funding of roughly $ 5.6m.

At the head of the company as CEO we have Ajay Gulati, former VMware employee and most known for Storage IO Control, Storage DRS and DRS. Kiran Bondapalati is the CTO and some may recognize that name as he was a lead architect on Bromium. The DNA of the company is a mix of VMware, Nutanix, Bromium, Cisco, Google an more. Not a bad list I must say

So what are they selling? ZeroStack has developed a private cloud solution which is delivered in two parts:

  1. Physical 2U/4Node Appliance which comes with KVM preinstalled named ZS1000
  2. Management / Monitoring solution which is delivered in a SaaS model.

ZeroStack showed me a demo and getting their appliance up and running took about 15 minutes, the configuration wizard wasn’t unlike EVO:RAIL and looked very easy to run through. The magic however if you ask me isn’t in their configuration section, it is the SaaS based management solution. I stole a diagram from their website which immediately shows the potential.

zerostack

The SaaS management layer provides you a single pane of glass of all the deployed appliances. These can be in a single site or in multiple sites. You can imagine that especially for ROBO deployments this is very useful, but also in larger environments. Now it doesn’t just show you the physical aspect, it also shows you all the logical constructs that have been created like “projects”.

At this part of the demo by the way I got reminded of vCloud Director a bunch of times, and AWS for that matter. ZeroStack allows you to create “tenants” and designate resources to them in the form of projects. These can even have a lease times, which is kind of similar to what vCloud Director offers also.

When looking at the networking aspects of ZeroStack’s solution it also has the familiar constructs like private networks and public networks etc. On top of that networking services like routing / firewall’ing are implemented also in a distributed fashion. And before I forget, everything you see in the UI can also be automated through the APIs which are fully Openstack compatible.

Last but not least we had a discussion about patching and updating. With most systems this is usually the most complicated part. ZeroStack took a very customer friendly approach. The SaaS layer is being updated by them, and this can happen as frequent as once every ten days. The team said they are very receptive to feedback and have a short turnaround time for implementing new functionality, as their goal is to provide most functionality through the SaaS layer. The appliance will be on a different patch/update scheme, probably once every 3 or 6 months, of course depending on the problems fixed and features introduced. The updates are done in a rolling fashion and non-disruptive to your workloads, as expected.

That sounds pretty cool right? Well as always with a 1.0 version there is still some functionality missing. Functionality that is missing in 1.0 is for instance a “high availability” feature for your workloads. If a host fails then you as an admin will need to restart those VMs. Also when it comes to load balancing, there is no “DRS-alike” functionality today. Considering the background of the team though, I can imagine both of those showing up at some point in the near future. It does however mean that for some workloads the 1.0 version may not be the right solution for now. Nevertheless, test/dev and things like cloud native apps could land on it.

All in all, a nice set of announcements and some cool functionality coming. These guys are going to be at VMworld so make sure to stop by their booth if you want to see what they are working on.

Platform9 announcements / funding

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Clearly VMworld is around the corner as many new products, releases and company announcements are being done this week and next. Last week I had the opportunity to catch up with Sirish Raghuram, Platform9‘s CEO. For those who don’t know who/what/where I recommend reading the two articles I wrote earlier this year. In short, Platform9 is a SaaS based private cloud management solution which leverages OpenStack. By Platform9 also described as “Openstack-as-a-Service”.

Over the last months Platform9 has grown to 27 people and is now actively focussing on scaling marketing and sales. They have already hired some very strong people from companies like Rackspace, EMC, Metacloud and VMware. Their series A funding was $ 4.5m by Redpoint Ventures, and now they announced a $ 10m Series B round which was led by Menlo Ventures and included Redpoint Ventures. Considering the state of Openstack startup community that is a big achievement if you ask me. The company has seen good revenue momentum in first two quarters of sales with QoQ growth of 200%, multiple site wide license agreements for 400+ servers in each quarter and customer deployments in 17 countries

So what is being announced? The GA of support for vSphere which has been in Beta since early this year. Basically this means that as of this release you can now manage local KVM and vSphere hosts using Platform9’s solution. What I like about their solution is that it is very easy to configure, and it is SaaS based so no worries about installing/configuring/upgrading/updating or maintenance of the management solution itself. Install / Configure takes less than 5 minutes. Basically you point it at your vCenter Server, a proxy VM will be deploy and then resources will be sucked in. The architecture for vSphere looks like this:

The cool thing is that it will integrate with existing vSphere deployments and if you have people managing vSphere with vCenter and they make changes then Platform9 is smart enough to recognize that and reconcile. On top of that all vSphere templates are also automatically pulled in so you can use those immediately when provisioning new VMs through Platform9. Managing VMs through Platform9 is very easy, but also if you are familiar with the OpenStack APIs then automating any aspect of Platform9 is a breeze as it is fully compatible. When it comes to managing resources and workloads, I think the UI speaks for itself. Very straight forward, very easy to use. Adding hosts, deploying new workloads or monitoring capacity, typically all done within a few clicks. When it comes to vSphere they also support things like the Distributed Switch and have support for NSX around the corner, for those who have the need for advanced networking / isolation / security etc.

Platform9 also introduces auto-scaling capabilities based on resource alarms and application templates. Both scaling-up and scaling-down of your workloads when needed is supported, which is something that comes up on a regular basis with customers I talk to. Platform9 can take care of the infrastructure side of scaling out, you worry about creating that scale-out application architecture, which is difficult enough as it is.

When it comes to their SaaS based platform it is good to know that their platform is not shared between customers. Which means that there is no risk of one customer high-jacking the environment of another customer. Also, the platform will scale independently and will scale automatically as your local environment grows. No need to worry about any of those aspects any longer, and of course because it is SaaS based Platform9 will take care of patching/updating/upgrading etc.

Personally I would love to see a couple of things added, I would find it useful if Platform9 could take care of Network Isolation… Just like Lab Manager was capable of doing in the past. It would also be great if Platform9 could manage “stand alone” ESXi hosts instead of having being pointed to vCenter Server. I do understand that brings some constraints etc, but it could be a nice feature… Either way, I like the single pane of glass they offer today, it can only get better. Nice job Platform9, keep those updates coming!

Startup Into: Platform9

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Yesterday a startup came out of stealth which was founded by a couple of former VMware veterans. I happen to know the majority of them, and have had the pleasure to have worked with them on various things in the past. For instance Platform9‘s three of the four co-founders were all heavily involved in vCloud Director, and the fourth co-founder was VMware employee number 27… but that is not where it stops… there is much more talent on-board. But that is not what this blog is about, this blog is about Platform9, the new company that they have formed and the product they are building.

** note, I did not test the product… it is impossible to provide an analysis of what works / does not work and how they play in this space or compete with others, this is based on a conversation and a demo **

Platform9 is as they say themselves:

… the easiest way for enterprises to implement a private cloud, with intelligent, self-service provisioning of workloads onto their computing infrastructure.

  • 100% Cloud Managed: Platform9’s cloud-based model means that there is no complex management software to setup, monitor and upgrade, thus simplifying the operational experience.
  • Single Pane of Glass: Platform9 offers unified management across diverse environments – Docker, KVM and VMware vSphere – across datacenters and geographies.
  • Based on OpenStack: Platform9 customers get the best of OpenStack with 100% API compatibility.

When I met them last month, they gave a demo and showed me what they had implemented so far: Management of KVM based hypervisors using a very easy to use and slick using web-based user interface. Where the whole management solution was running in “the cloud”.

Creating a new “instance” was literally a few clicks, snapshotting / cloning it… same thing, just a couple of clicks. Now what stood out to me during the demo was the use of the word “instance” instead of “virtual machine”. So I asked them why not “virtual machine”, considering they are all VMware veterans that made more sense to me. The explanation was simple: we want to manage multiple layers. We want to manage KVM VMs, vSphere VMs but for instance also Docker containers. That is why we used a different term than we would normally use… and yes that did make sense to me. I also wondered if they would be able to mix different environments and type of instance in their UI, and the answer was yes. Docker containers, KVM VMs, vSphere VMs (etc) will also be seen in the same single pane of glass. I really like the fact that Platform9 did not limit themselves to just vSphere, or just VMs but rather is focusing on the needs of developers and providing what they require.

Similar to CloudPhysics, Platform9 is taking SaaS approach. The major benefit of course being the agility at which new features/functionality can be introduced to the outside world, or tested against a small subset of customers. Same of course applies to bug fixes / updates. No need to do that yourself, Platform9 will take care of that for you. Promising indeed.

Now there is a lot of competition in this space, as also emphasized by  Ben Kepes in his post on Platform9… But to be honest, if I look at one of the examples listed like ServiceMesh, they seem to cater for a completely different market. Platform9 is all about simplicity and managing instances, not so much about creating complex recipes etc. I agree though that there are a lot of vendors playing in this space (and as such competition), or somewhat related space, but that makes it even more interesting to see how Platform9 evolves in my opinion.

For more info, a demo, or a trial:

Platform9 will showcase its product in its booth #324 at VMware’s VMworld Conference, taking place the week of August 25th in San Francisco. The product is currently in beta with general availability planned for later this year. Platform9 currently supports KVM with upcoming support for Docker and VMware vSphere. To register for a free trial, go to: http://www.platform9.com.