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Platform9 Systems Inc. is a B2B cloud computing software company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.[1][2] It provides technology and support for businesses to build and automate OpenStack- and Kubernetes-based cloud infrastructure as Software-as-a-Service on their existing servers.[3][4] In other words, Platform9 enables enterprises to use their existing infrastructure and turn it into a fully managed private cloud. Platform9 currently supports VMware vsphere, KVM and Docker platforms. Platform9 has been named in the CRN's emerging vendors list in 2016.[5]

History

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The company was founded in 2013 by VMware veterans Sirish Raghuram, Madhura Maskasky, Bich Le and Roopak Parikh in Sunnyvale, California.[6] [7]  The idea to start Platform9 came about as the founding engineers realized that the deployment and management paradigm for enterprise infrastructure was fundamentally inferior in comparison to public cloud architecture. The company’s initial product focus was to roll out an OpenStack private cloud easily, almost as easily as starting to use a public cloud such as AWS. Platform9 Managed OpenStack was launched in 2014 with initial support for KVM. Support for VMware vSphere infrastructure was added in 2015.[8]It has received two rounds of funding: $4.5 million in Series A from Redpoint Ventures in August 2014 and $10 million in Series B from Redpoint and Menlo Ventures in August 2015.[9]

OpenStack

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The company sells Platform9 Managed OpenStack, a cloud management platform to automate the backend for OpenStack running in an existing or a new environment. Platform9 reduces operational complexity of private clouds, thereby presenting enterprises a choice between public and private clouds.[10] OpenStack is deployed as an infrastructure-as-a-service software. Platform9 provides OpenStack-as-a-service using its Saas model for monitoring, deployment and scaling of private cloud. Platform9 also provides high-availability capability to its enterprise customers.

Motivation

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Cloud and IT service providers are expected to provide public cloud features like scalability, reliability and deftness to user systems containing complex and obsolete software. Often, the architecture of these software packages wouldn't have been designed to run in a cloud infrastructure.In addition to this, the recent advancements in Open software such as the emerging diversity in virtualization, containers, distributed workload managers pose new challenges to IT service providers. For every new technology, a new management system has to be designed to accommodate them, as otherwise operating across multiple data-centers would prove to be a chaotic job. In order to keep up with the advancements and incorporate them in an already existing infrastructure, IT service providers need to do extensive research, zero-in on the software that would provide best results and fulfill all their business requirements and also learn the pros and cons of that software.

Public clouds is an option to turn to, and they are deft and simple to implement but they lack security and flexibility[11]. Platform9 managed Openstack transforms existing infrastructures into a self service private cloud and makes deployment simpler. A wide range of software packages can be installed, configured and run using Platform9. Platform9 provides self service private cloud capability using OpenStack's rich ecosystem. Organisations can use their own infrastructures and consolidate all their resources into a single logical pool with centralized visibility and control.

Architecture

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Architecture Platform9

The cloud controller is fully managed and supported by Platform9. OpenStack services such as nova-compute, cinder-volume and neutron that need to run on the resources are facilitated by Platform9. The nodes in the bottom half of the architecture are run in the customer's data center. According to the roles assigned by the user, the Platform9 agent downloads OpenStack software from the Cloud controller, installs and configures them into the hosts or the resources that are to be managed. These OpenStack software packages are used as a mode of communication between the user nodes and the Controller.[12]

Communication between OpenStack components is carried out by a variety of mechanisms and network protocols. With customer network policies are taken into account, communication can present a challenge. Platform9 uses HTTPS encapsulation to wrap all the communication channels, thereby allowing Platform9 to comply with all the user policies and at the same time, overcome the communication challenge.

Setting up Platform9 managed OpenStack on Linux / KVM

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Platform9 managed Openstack supports Linux/KVM and VMware vSphere platforms. The minimum configuration required to run Platform9 managed Openstack on Linux is 1-3 physical servers with storage and network interface for each.

  • Servers : Platform9 managed Openstack requires three servers preferably. The operating system in these servers should be one of the below listed Linux operating systems.
  • Storage : 3 types of storage are required, namely Local storage to configure a hypervisor, a NFS share storage with which the hypervisor is configured and a Block storage.
  • Network Interface : Every hypervisor is expected to have atleast one physical network interface, and Outbound https access to communicate with Platform9 configuration plane and VLAN sub-interfaces such as VLAN-based virtual machine traffic, Management VLAN, Tunneled GRE/VXLAN VLAN, External VLAN and a storage VLAN

Neutron network configuration

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Once the hypervisors are configured, one or more physical servers can be added to Platform9 using the "Add host" button in the "Infrastructure" tab. After adding, the Platform9 host agent is downloaded and deployed in the linux server. Authorization of hosts is required before the hosts can be utilized, hence an alert appears in the Platform9 dashboard notifying the user that a new server is to be authorized before it can be completely deployed and used.

The final step before creating tenants is to configure the Image Library. One of the three servers is designated the Image library role and once this is done, we can invite other users to use our private cloud by adding them as tenants.[12]

User setup

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A new customer creates an account in the Platform9 web portal. As soon the account is created, a new OpenStack cloud controller that is dedicated to the user is set up by Platform9 and hosted either in Platform9's data center or in the enterprise's cloud. This self-service OpenStack cloud controller is maintained, updated and deployed by Platform9. In order to add dedicated resources to the cloud, a customer logs into the SaaS UI and downloads the Linux agent. When the OpenStack cloud controller detects a new agent being downloaded, a new tab named 'Hosts' pops up and the controller awaits authorization by the user, and finally the user assigns roles to the hosts in the UI.[12]

Kubernetes

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Platform9 launched its Managed Kubernetes product in 2016 to focus on making it easy to deploy and manage Docker containers using the Kubernetes framework. Platform9 Managed Kubernetes is turnkey, scalable with operational capabilities and service-level guarantee to deploy and run containers in production under the Kubernetes environment.[13]

Companies with similar products

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See also

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  1. ^ Justin Warren (7 March 2016). "Platform9 Makes Private Cloud Easy". Forbes.
  2. ^ Joseph Tsidulko (16 May 2016). "A Higher Gear: OpenStack Startup Platform9 Launches Channel Program". CRN. Retrieved 3 August 2016.
  3. ^ Jamie Davies (17 May 2016). "Platform9 launches OpenStack channel partner program". Business Cloud News. Retrieved 3 August 2016.
  4. ^ Ben Kepes (12 August 2014). "Platform9 Emerges From Stealth To Cloudify Existing Infrastructure". Forbes. Retrieved 3 August 2016.
  5. ^ "2016 Emerging Vendors - CRN". CRN. Retrieved 2016-09-23.
  6. ^ Ron Miller (11 August 2014). "VMware Vets Get $4.5M In Series A To Launch Private Cloud Management Platform". Techcrunch. Retrieved 3 August 2016.
  7. ^ Keith Townsend (22 August 2015). "Platform9 simplifies the challenge of running OpenStack on VMware infrastructure". TechRepublic. Retrieved 3 August 2016.
  8. ^ Keith Townsend (22 August 2015). "Platform9 simplifies the challenge of running OpenStack on VMware infrastructure". TechRepublic. Retrieved 3 August 2016.
  9. ^ Barb Darrow (18 August 2015). "Platform9 scores $10 million to manage mixed clouds". Fortune. Retrieved 3 August 2016.
  10. ^ "WTH? Upstart stuffed with ex-VMware bods grilled on Amazon cloud 'rescue' plan". Retrieved 2016-09-14.
  11. ^ "Cloud computing". Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. 2016-09-09.
  12. ^ a b c d "Platform 9 | Tutorial | videos". Retrieved 2016-09-14.
  13. ^ "Kubernetes Announcement". Retrieved 2016-09-14.
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