Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

platform9

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!

Platform9 manages private clouds as a service

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A couple of months ago I introduced you to this new company founded by 4 former VMware employees called Platform9. I have been having discussions with them occasionally about what they were working on and I’ve been very intrigued by what they are building and am very pleased to see there first version go GA and want to congratulate them with hitting this major milestone. For those who are not familiar with what they do, this is what their website says:

Platform9 Managed OpenStack is a cloud service that enables Enterprises to manage their internal server infrastructure as efficient private clouds.

In short, they have a PaaS based solution which allows you to simply manage KVM based virtualization hosts. It is a very simple way of creating a private cloud and it will literally get your KVM based solution up and running in minutes which very welcome in this world where things seem to become increasingly more complex, and especially when you talk about KVM/Openstack.

Besides the GA announcement the pricing model was also announced. The pricing model follows the same “pay per month” model as CloudPhysics has. In the case of  Platform9 the costs are $49 per CPU per month with an annual subscription being required. This is for what they call their “business tier” which has unlimited scale. There is also a “lite tier” which is free but will have limited scale and is mainly aimed for people to test Platform9 and learn about their offering. An Enterprise tier is also in the works and will offer more advanced features and premium support. Features it will include additionally to what the Business tier offers appear to be mainly in the “software defined networking”  and security space, so I would expect things like firewalling, network isolation, single sign-on etc.

I highly recommend watching the Virtualization Field Day 4 videos as they demonstrate perfectly what they are capable off. The video that is probably most interesting to you is the one where they demonstrate a beta of the offering they are planning for vSphere (embedded below). The beta shows vSphere hosts and KVM hosts in a single pane of glass. The end-user can deploy “instances” (virtual machines) in the environment of choice using a single tool which from an operational perspective is great. On top of that, Platform9 discovers existing workloads on KVM and vSphere and non-disruptively adds them to their management interface.

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.