Since we launched our enterprise Platform9 Managed Kubernetes (PMK) three years ago, we learned a lot about real-world Kubernetes deployments. Large enterprise customers like Juniper have battle-tested our enterprise PMK product at scale running on hundreds of bare metal nodes across data centers. Many customers have benefited from our SaaS management capabilities, including automated deployments, upgrades, security patching, and SLA management.
In the last 12 months, we had several successful Kubernetes deployments around the world, highlighting enterprise momentum in Kubernetes and validating our industry-leading SaaS Management model.
Operating Kubernetes at scale is extremely challenging
However, we also found that a vast majority of companies are struggling with the complexity of operating Kubernetes in production. Kubernetes is complex and notoriously difficult to manage, particularly in on-premises or multi-cloud environments. Day 2 Operations are incredibly challenging: how do you handle upgrades to your clusters when there’s a new version or a security patch? How do you do the monitoring? HA? Scaling? Compliance? And more.
The operational pain is compounded by the industry-wide talent scarcity and skills gap. Most companies are struggling to hire the much sought-after Kubernetes experts, and they lack advanced Kubernetes experience to ensure smooth operations at scale.
Delivering production-grade Kubernetes in a way that doesn’t make your existing staff run for the hills (or get left holding the bag..) is tough.
Many companies are still learning the ropes with Kubernetes
Furthermore, not everybody is ready to go into production right away. For many companies, Kubernetes is still new, and they are kicking tires to figure out why, if, and when they want to use it. Companies want the room to start small, learn, test, and then scale to production on their terms.
Therefore, we decided to make our enterprise Kubernetes product more accessible across the board no matter where the customer is on their Kubernetes journey. We wanted DevOps teams and developers everywhere to enjoy the freedom of using Kubernetes at their own pace and in any environment of their choice so they can innovate for the business without having to deal with the day-to-day complexities of running Kubernetes in production.
Announcing new “Freedom” and “Growth” PMK plans
We are excited to announce today the launch of two new PMK plans (“Freedom’ and ‘Growth’) that allow DevOps, ITOps, Platform Engineering, and cloud architects to
- Sign up online and instantly create upstream open-source Kubernetes clusters in under 5 minutes
- Deploy clusters in any environment ranging from developer laptops, on-premises VM’s or bare metal servers to edge infrastructure or public clouds
- Eliminate the constraints of Kubernetes skills, long implementation times, or management of day-2 operational activities such as upgrades, security patching, or monitoring, etc.
- Gain the flexibility to start small, learn, test, and scale to production on their terms and pace.
Sign-up now to deploy your free cluster: https://www.platform9.com/signup
The Freedom plan is great for anyone getting started with Kubernetes and allows users to instantly install Kubernetes clusters of up to 20 nodes (800 vCPU’s).
The Growth plan starts under $500/month, including an option for month-to-month payments, and provides 99.9% SLA and 24×7 support for up to 50 nodes (2000 vCPU’s).
For more details on these pricing options, check out https://www.platform9.com/pricing
An extensive set of core features and support options unmatched anywhere
Before we dive into the details, first an important distinction:
Those of us who want to leverage Kubernetes in the enterprise know that words like “managed” and “service” (or “as-a-service”) are often thrown around with enterprise Kubernetes solutions. But they describe VERY different levels – and philosophies – of “management,” and of “service.”
What we mean is a fully-managed Kubernetes service, where Platform9 does all of the heavy lifting and ongoing operations. So you don’t have to deal with any of the operational complexity. Don’t mistake ‘managed service’ to mean a lot of people on keyboards manually managing your environment. Platform9 delivers a public-cloud like service in on-premises, edge, and multi-cloud environments. This service is provided using a SaaS delivery model, developed with thousands of person-years of software automation engineering work. Moreover, the service is backed by our additional layer of Kubernetes certified experts and customer success teams who also monitor and remediate the environment.
Both the Freedom and Growth plans use the same battle-tested and proven enterprise edition of Platform9 Managed Kubernetes (PMK) and provide the following set of core capabilities:
- A SaaS Management Plane that remotely monitors, optimizes and heals your clusters and underlying infrastructure, across all of your environments
- Self-service, instant cluster creation (under 5 minutes) with native integrations across private and public clouds
- 1-click, in-place cluster upgrades to the latest version of Kubernetes
- Automatic security patches – when a new CVE is discovered and fixed, a patch is automatically applied to all clusters
- Built-in monitoring and alerts to ensure cluster health, including etcd cluster quorum lost, etcd node down, etcd repair failure, infrastructure resource utilization, node storage issues, network connectivity between nodes, docker daemon down, and more
- Managed Observability (Prometheus and more) is included by default. Users can configure these tools for their specific needs for each cluster (connect to a different persistent storage or data visualization tool, etc. Grafana dashboard is integrated by default.)
- Centrally manage all clusters from a single pane of glass
- Control access to resources with fine-grained Kubernetes RBAC management
And much, much more.
For a more detailed list of capabilities and comparison of these plans, Check out: https://www.platform9.com/pricing/comparison
We believe these plans will make Kubernetes a no-brainer for DevOps, ITOps, and cloud platform teams in any company no matter how large or small, no matter where they are in their Kubernetes journey- providing everyone with a superior experience of the Kubernetes services on their infrastructure (on-prem, or in the cloud or at the edge)