I came across Platform9 while wandering the back halls of the VMWorld Solutions Exchange last year in San Francisco…as a fan of the movie District 9 I was drawn to the name without really knowing anything about the tech being shown. After a brief chat with the booth staff going over product I thought to myself that there was potential in a SaaS based Cloud Management/Provisioning Platform…another side of me thought it also threatens part of the work I do in designing and managing Service Provider based Cloud Platforms like vCloud Director.

A few months later Platfrom9 has launched with fresh rounds of VC funding and is ready to go prime time. I spent some time today with Sirish Raghuram Who is the CEO and Co-founder…he also has a very interesting pedigree having previously been with VMware since 2002 working on products like Workstation, SRM and vCloud Director…in fact he was part of the team responsible for bringing maturity to later versions of vCD.

Sirish took me through the basics of what Platform9 offers and how it easily plugs into on-premises Hypervisior resources focusing on KVM with BETA support for ESXi…effectively what you get with Platform9 is your own version of the Openstack Platform and your own Management Portal to control compute, storage and network resources. You then to carve up those resources for use by departments or clients. Like vCloud Director, it abstracts management and provides a mechanism to consume IaaS resources.

platform9

What I like about this solution is that its easy…Implementing Openstack is not! …Especially if you choose to deploy and manage it yourself. The time savings along with budget savings compared with deploying and maintaining OpenStack in-house make this an attractive option. It also potentially fills a gap in the market that’s been vacated by VMware’s decision to pull vCD from Enterprise and replace it with the more complicated (dare I say bloated) vRealize Automation. To clarify that comment, think about a situation where a company has a small vCenter Instance with two or three hosts…vRA isn’t the best fit if the company wants to explore Private Cloud…Platform9 fits in nicely and can be retrofitted with ease.

For Service Providers if offers an opportunity to experience Openstack and take advantage of its KVM strengths…dual stacks become a more plausible option and with access to refined APIs it makes it easy for SPs with existing Account/Control Panels to integrate and add to existing offerings. There is also a lot of interest in it’s potential for management of Docker…which is all the rage these days.

For me, this isn’t going to replace vCloud Director SP for vSphere Platforms short to medium term…there are a lot of holes in what Openstack does compared to vCloud Director but there is a future here and there are many use cases where Platform9 makes sense.