DEVOPSdigest

Platform9 announced its latest version of the Platform9 Managed Kubernetes (PMK) product.

The product offers SaaS Managed Kubernetes with IPv6 support for 5G deployments, and several advanced networking technologies and support capabilities to optimize 5G service delivery, the ability to centrally connect and manage AWS EKS clusters, and unified management of virtual machines and containers.

“Our latest product release addresses the specific challenges faced by DevOps and platform teams with distributed Kubernetes deployments in 5G infrastructure roll-outs, multi-cluster management in public clouds, and siloed management of VMs and containers,” said Madhura Maskasky, VP of Product at Platform9 systems. “We continue to deliver these new capabilities through our SaaS delivery model which removes operational burden by offloading the complex tasks of deployment, support, upgrades, monitoring, and troubleshooting across all clusters, no matter where they are deployed.”

For communications service providers (CSPs) and their ecosystem of network software providers, Platform9 now provides several advanced networking features designed to deliver near line-rate performance for network packets. Furthermore, the new release enables fully automated configuration and integration of host, physical, and virtual networks with Kubernetes clusters for deploying and managing cloud-native 5G RAN, IMS, Packet Core, Edge Virtual Network Functions, and Container Network Functions.

Featured advanced networking capabilities include:

- IPv6 support for all native services and users’ Kubernetes clusters

- API-driven automated IP address management (IPAM) out of the box

- Multiple high-performance networking options: SR-IOV, DPDK, PCI-passthrough, MACvLan, and IPvLAN

- A fully-managed Kubernetes operator to automate the configuration of a host, its physical network, and all necessary Kubernetes components, without the need to access the host

- Advanced pod scheduling and deterministic performance with CPU-pinning, NUMA-aware scheduling, HugePages, Topology Manager, and CPU manager

Additionally, Platform9 is making it easier for users to manage their existing Kubernetes clusters in public clouds. With this release, DevOps engineers and cloud operators can now connect and manage all of their existing AWS EKS clusters from Platform9’s central management console. This feature enables operators to:

- Apply consistent governance policies to prevent “shadow” cluster creations and get visibility for security and cost management

- Deploy pre-configured Prometheus and Grafana for Monitoring of EKS clusters

- Leverage Platform9’s fully-managed Helm-service to deploy applications from public and private repositories

Platform9’s cloud-native vision allows users to install and manage the lifecycle of containers, virtual machines, and bare metal, in any location, under one unified management plane.

This new version includes early access to “Managed KubeVirt,” now available in the Freedom Tier as well. Managed KubeVirt enables users to manage VMs by Kubernetes alongside containers so they can overcome the operational silos that exist today, and standardize on Kubernetes as the control plane -- without having to worry about porting all of the existing and legacy applications to containers or managing two entirely separate stacks.

The Platform9 Release 5.1 is available now with support for Kubernetes version 1.19 for all freedom, growth, and enterprise users.