Cloud Ease of Use, Performance, and Cost Savings: You CAN Have It All

Platform9 helps customers build and run their cloud every day – with a SaaS-based, easy to use platform that lets you manage your hybrid environment- across bare metal, public cloud, containers and even Serverless.

However, since the company’s inception, we have always run our own SaaS offering and our backend systems on AWS. When you’re a budding startup, you can get started faster by throwing a few instances onto a public cloud provider. However, as we grew in number of customers and the scale of each deployment, we quickly realized the need to rethink our operational model. Those instances, in the long run, can get quite expensive.

Taking Advantage of the Cloud Without Breaking the Bank:

As the operational cost becomes prohibiting, we see companies looking for a path out of AWS. This is true from organizations of various sizes – our own operations at Platform9, our customers LogMeIn and Scality, as well as Apple, Dropbox and others, who have also moved off AWS recently. You want scale and agility, while being able to control the total cost of infrastructure and ensure operational predictability.

Similar to the customers we help, we also had several requirements when building our private cloud:

We wanted to retain our automated operational processes – and continue managing our environment with automatic scale, failover and error handling in a similar fashion to what we were used to on AWS.
We wanted it to be multi-tenant and highly available – so we can ensure our SALs and continue to provide the same level of service and user experience to our growing number of customers who have trusted us with their mission critical applications.
We wanted our cloud to be cost effective, and be able to scale in a cost effective way to support the growing demands of the business.

Migrating off AWS:

We did our homework: We looked at several options, from completely self-managed space in a co-location to staying in the public cloud. We eventually settled on building a solution using Platform9 with Packet, by deploying on their infrastructure and leveraging Datera as our shared storage backend.

We chose this solution for several reasons:

Leveraging Platform9 enabled us to retain our ability to automate deployment and operations’ processes and made the migration of our code painless.
Using Platform9’s hybrid-cloud features allowed us to design a multi-tenant cloud with leases and quotas for capacity management across our containerized and VM-based services as well as our public cloud workloads.
Packet’s enabling of automation of bare metal aligns with our own belief that automation is the only way to scale infrastructure reliably. This results in fast, painless support for deployment of configuration changes, easy maintenance and fast response for scale or failover events.

With our solution managing Packet infrastructure, we not only eat our own dogfood, we also provide the blueprint for any company that needs an easy to manage multi-tenant cloud that scales economically. This allowed us to pull off a migration from AWS that would faze most companies, without having to hire dedicated resources to manage the migration or, alternatively, manage the AWS costs full-time. We did this with a small, awesome operations team that deserves a lot of credit for being able to pull this off without any disruptions to our customers (and without taking years to complete :)).

Our Ops team sighing a sigh of relief with the completion of the migration off AWS (left to right): Gavin Ray, Ops Engineer; Vincent Ramirez, Solutions Architect; Kaustubh Phatak, Ops Engineer, and Cody Hill, Cloud Architect.

You Can Have it All!

What makes sense for our own business and for many others, is in fact the exact capabilities that Platform9 offers to our users: cost savings without compromising performance, automation and on-demand experience – for both Dev and Ops. With a powerful cloud experience in your own environment — you CAN have it all.

You can read more about our partnership with Packet and Datera on TechCrunch, and also check out the case study on Packet’s site for additional details around our migration from AWS.

Feel free to reach out to discuss how Platofrm9 can help your business seamlessly migrate from AWS for improved CAPEX, without sacrificing agility and time to market.

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Platform9

Platform9’s comprehensive private cloud platform offers built-in automation and ease of use with the flexibility to bring your own compute, storage, and network—delivering a public cloud-like experience. Founded by a team of cloud pioneers from VMware, Platform9’s private cloud platform has powered over 20,000 nodes in production across some of the world’s largest enterprises like Cloudera, EBSCO, Juniper Networks, and Rackspace. With a comprehensive SaaS-based control plane, Always-On Assurance™, and decades of experience, Platform9 helps businesses embrace the future of private cloud with ease and confidence.