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Want a world–class Private Cloud? Think SaaS!

Gregory Levineby Gregory Levine

I experienced firsthand the difficulties of engineering an IaaS & CaaS environment with open–source distros for OpenStack and Kubernetes. Although my engineering teams were excited about the opportunity, it quickly became clear that a significant increase in resources would be required to provide just the basic capabilities, let alone anything close to what AWS or Azure offered in their Public Clouds. Months became years, and our Private Cloud fell further behind the Public Cloud providers, and the service provided to our IT, Development, and DevOps teams was impacting their ability to deliver to the business.

Over the last year, I have met many IT leaders that are pursuing Hybrid Cloud strategies and facing similar challenges providing IaaS and CaaS services, especially for their Private Clouds. This is understandable since, as I explained above, it is not easy to engineer and implement solutions leveraging open–source distros for OpenStack and Kubernetes. Even implementing 3rd party IaaS/CaaS products (e.g., VMware, HP, Red Hat) takes considerable resources, talent, and time. And in both cases, you will have to contend with significant Day 2 operating expenses to maintain, upgrade, and monitor these solutions.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a full–featured service, capable of running active workloads, right at your fingertips for OpenStack and Kubernetes? The service would offer the same AWS–Like experience with respect to provisioning, configuring, and managing compute and containers for your Private Cloud, but without the DIY hassle. i.e., a SaaS model for IaaS and Container Orchestration.

If the above resonates with you, then consider Plaform9’s 100% cloud based as–a–service for OpenStack and Kubernetes. Ideal for building/enhancing your private cloud, while fully enabling and greatly simplifying public cloud exploitation too.

Manage across any server or cloud infrastructure: our service creates a unified console across servers, storage and networks running KVM (Linux), Docker, and VMware vSphere; and public clouds such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. You provide the systems, we provide hybrid cloud solutions as a service – Platform9

Platform9 manages the complexity for you and allows you to easily integrate OpenStack and Kubernetes into your environment. Platform9 makes it easy to run hybrid clouds across any infrastructure. Unlike DIY approaches or legacy distributions, Platform9 delivers OpenStack and Kubernetes as SaaS Managed solutions that offer instant time to value, require zero maintenance, and easily integrate with all your infrastructure and platform services (e.g., Chef, Puppet, Jenkins, etc.). With Platform9, you can avoid undifferentiated heavy lifting.

Managed OpenStack and Managed Kubernetes are deployed, monitored, supported, and upgraded as a SaaS solution. DevOps and IT teams can therefore focus on delivering core business value using these frameworks with minimal overhead, rather than the upkeep of these environments – Platform9

Platform9’s OpenStack service delivers full private cloud automation, enabling self–service within minutes at any scale. Start to realize benefits associated with world-class IaaS:

The service leverages your on–premises server infrastructure, pooling resources in a single data center or across multiple data centers. Your team sets policies, quotas, and creates libraries of images and templates to enable quick and controlled consumption of compute and storage resources. Platform9’s user interface makes it easy for developers and other end users to quickly provision what they need.

Platform9’s Kubernetes service is the industry’s only SaaS managed solution that is infrastructure agnostic, working across public clouds and on–premises server infrastructure.

The service allows you to create and manage highly available, multi–master, multi–etcd Kubernetes clusters that can span across availability zones in your private or public cloud environments, with the assurance that your data will stay in the appropriate region. Microservices developers can use the Kubernetes service independent of the OpenStack service, virtualized application developers can use the OpenStack service, and DevOps can manage across both frameworks through a single pane of glass.

Why is Platform9 required if my cloud strategy is SaaS and/or Public Cloud? For many enterprises, a certain portion of their Well Architected Cloud Framework will be Private Cloud for many years.

Well Architected Cloud Framework

Platform9 simplifies and quickly enables you to enhance/create a world–class Private Cloud for your IT teams, which accelerates their ability to create real business value. As I stated in my earlier Cloud First! post, "...internal IT cannot compete with public cloud service providers...". Public cloud service providers have the scale, resources, and service features that make it impossible for internal IT to compete. So yes, complete your buy vs build due diligence. In the end, I believe you will discover that Platform9 provides the greatest ROI.

Contact us at Hararei, a Platform9 Channel Partner, to learn more about Platform9’s value propostion.

IT Leaders are under tremendous pressure to move to the Cloud. Hararei can help formulate your Cloud Strategy and assist with the transition to the target environment.

Hararei is an Edge Solutions Provider committed to helping clients prepare for, adopt, and deploy the latest generation of applications and IT infrastructure in Cloud environments. We help establish well defined roadmaps to maximize your ROI for Cloud services (cost, service levels, productivity, agility, and security).

We understand that the journey to a more agile infrastructure is unique for every company. Contact us for a confidential discussion about the possibilities! We provide IT solutions that lower cost, increase agility, improve productivity, and reduce risks.

 Original Article     Hararei Blog