Kubernetes can pose a steep learning curve for those coming from a more traditional infrastructure background. Its adoption is growing as we know, and there are a lot of IT Operations practitioners scrambling to get up to speed with the container management and control plane platform. The success of the public cloud Kubernetes services on GCP, AWS and Azure has meant that if you want to operate a Kubernetes environment you can easily enough deploy a cluster and be somewhat up and running without too much hassle. But what about the on-premises deployments? The problem comes when you want to extend that platform for self service, monitoring and  ongoing maintenance. In this open-source world, new versions are are released often, and at many levels of the Kubernetes stack… be that storage, networking or runtimes.

This is where Platform9 comes into play and recently, I had Sirish Raghuram to talk about how Platform9 offers Managed Kubernetes and OpenStack as as service. I’ve been close to Platform9 since they came out of stealth back in 2014 and they have evolved to where they are today based on making bets on where the industry was heading and what tooling would be central to developers today… more importantly they realise that Infrastructure still needs to play a big part in that journey and their platform allows operations and management across different underlying platforms at scale.

Watch and listen to Episode 22 of Great Things with Great Tech (episode segments listed below):

  • Intro (0:00​)
  • Platform9 mission and company (1:34​)
  • Early days at VMware, Convertor and VMware Cloud Director (3:10​)
  • The rise of AWS as a motivator and opportunity lost (6:05​)
  • Virtualization fundamentals va Kubernetes​ (8:50​)
  • Platform9’s Founding and behind the name (9:50​)
  • Reducing Complexity with Platform9 with SaaS (12:30​)
  • Coming out of Stealth at VMworld 2014 (13:30​)
  • Early days using VMware and KVM with Platform9 (16:00​)
  • Just Add Water Simplicity (17:10​)
  • Using OpenSource​ with CloudStack andOpenStack (19:00​)
  • Kubernetes and Containers in 2016 (21:35​)
  • First SaaS Based Managed Kubernetes Service (24:10​)
  • Solving Kubernetes Deployment and Day 2 Issues (29:00​)
  • Continued Evolution, Investment and Innovation (31:25​)
  • 5G Rollout and what it means for Kubernetes (34:00​)
  • Sirish on where Kubernetes is today. Complexity vs Efficiency vs Success (38:20​)
  • Lowering the complexity of Kubernetes with Platform9 (45:05​)
  • Platform9 Free Tier (48:00​)
  • Wrap-up and callouts (45:10​)

In this episode I talk with Sirish Raghuram, , CEO and Co-Founder at Platform9. Platform9 provides SaaS based Managed Kubernetes, Openstack and Serverless for public, private and edge platforms. They deliver cloud-native technologies with SaaS simplicity that are easy to install, operate and scale, while supporting broad cloud capabilities that run on any infrastructure. Sirish and I talk about his early days working as one of the early VMware Engineers and how the paradigm of what cloud was lit the fire to join up with his co-founders and start Platform9. We discuss VMware Cloud Director, the early days of OpenStack, Docker and Kubernetes and how the latter won the container manager race, has matured, but is not quiet there yet in terms of mass adoption.

Platform9 was founded in 2013 and is headquartered in Mountain View, CA, USA.

☑️ Technology and Technology Partners Mentioned

Kubernetes, OpenStack, CloudStack, VMware, VMware Cloud Director, Docker, Containers, KVM, Mesosphere, Docker Swarm, Linux

☑️ Shoutouts and Notes:

Web: https://platform9.com/​
Platform9 Free Tier: https://platform9.com/signup-flow/?sandbox