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Cloud Field Day 2 Preview: Platform9

July 20th, 2017 No comments

Cloud Field Day 2, part of the Tech Field Day family of events is happening in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, from 26-28 July and I’m super excited to be invited as a delegate.

We are hearing from a number of companies about how they cloud!

Platform9 is a regular Tech Field Day presenter and I am lucky to be able to heard from them directly when I attended Virtualisation Field Day 4 in 2015 when it was just starting

The company was founded in 2013 by some clever VMware people who wanted to create a company to provide managed cloud infrastructure with two important distinctions. They wanted their offerings to be SaaS managed and wanted it to use open source software.

It’s first product was a cloud managed OpenStack. OpenStack was (is?) hellishly complicated to set up and manage yourself so Platform9 stepped in and offered a cloud managed OpenStack which would run on-premises. Platform9 would take all the hassle away of deploying and upgrading OpenStack and you could spend your time using your OpenStack private cloud rather than managing it.

As the cloud landscape evolved and containers became the next big thing, Platform9 added a managed Kubernetes option. Kubernetes is also difficult to set up so Platform9 came to the rescue. Clouds don’t stand still and Platform9 now has an alpha version of its own Serverless offering called Fission (plenty to say about this).

Platform9 is a cloud infrastructure management company following the current cloud trajectory in what seems like an ideal evolving portfolio: Managed servers, then managed containers then managed Serverless.

The company has had a recent fund injection of $22m with a mix of existing a new investors to bring the total capital raised to date to £36.5m, a helpful war chest. It currently manages 200 enterprise clouds worldwide.

Hybrid Cloud

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Virtualisation Field Day 4 Preview: Platform9

January 8th, 2015 No comments

Virtualisation Field Day 4 is happening in Austin, Texas from 14th-16th January and I’m very lucky to be invited as a delegate.

I’ve been previewing the companies attending, have a look at my introductory post: Virtualisation Field Day 4 Preview.

 

Platform9 is new to Tech Field Day so we welcome them to VFD4 and they only came out of stealth 6 months ago. OpenStack’s issues are complexity and divergence and Platform9 intends to fix that with a cloud management model. You simply pull your hypervisors into Platform9 running as a 100% SaaS application.

Remember, OpenStack isn’t in itself a hypervisor, you have to provide your own (KVM or coming soon vSphere) but install an agent on your hosts and connect them into Platform9 and you have your OpenStack private cloud management done from the public cloud and set up in minutes.

Sure people are going to say that there are security and availability concerns but I bet VMware’s long term plans for the new vRealize Air is vSphere management from the cloud, Citrix has already announced it will be doing XenDesktop/XenApp management from the cloud and Microsoft is hinting the same thing. VM data won’t be transferring the bad old internet, just VM metadata over a secure connection so it’s not necessarily all security panic stations.

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