How Platform9 Left AWS, Ate its Own Dogfood, Saved Money and Scaled

Platform9 offers the industry’s only SaaS delivered and managed cloud infrastructure platform that accelerates developer productivity while reducing IT spend and increasing resource utilization across data centers and clouds. Unlike traditional enterprise point solutions that rely on expensive professional services and lock you into their proprietary solutions, Platform9’s SaaS managed solution, which involves the hosting of OpenStack and Kubernetes control planes for customers centrally in the cloud, delivers a simple, unified experience using leading open source cloud frameworks technologies, thereby reducing operational complexity and costs, and accelerating cloud adoption.

Why Platform9 Decided to Host Its Own Infrastructure

Here at Platform9, we had hosted our SaaS platform on Amazon Web Services (AWS) since the start of our company. However, during the past two years as our customer base and operations grow, we saw our AWS hosting costs grow dramatically. We realized we required a solution that would enable us to scale our customer base and do it in a cost-efficient manner.

The Challenge

We needed to look for alternative ways to host our services today, for both cost and operational reasons:

Our customer base had tripled over the last two years.
During this same time, our AWS hosting costs increased more than three times. This was not sustainable.
As we grew as a company, multiple teams required cloud services and we had to create multiple accounts per team. This led to a sprawl that was hard to manage.

We needed a simple solution for managing Platform9’s infrastructure.

The Solution

Just like any other operations team, we performed due diligence and compared Platform9 against all three major public clouds (Google, Microsoft, and Amazon). Through this research, we realized that Platform9’s SaaS managed platform fit our needs the best from both a cost and complexity perspective for creating a cloud hosting environment.

Since we did not want to rack and stack our own servers, we chose a Bare Metal as a Service (MaaS) provider to deliver the hardware. Then we layered our Platform9’s cloud APIs on top of that to deliver a full-fledged operational cloud at about one-third the cost. This is what we found:

Standing up services. With Platform9 being a SaaS-based offering, once the hardware was available, standing up the cloud was very easy.
Migration. With Platform9’s cloud-based APIs, migrating our applications was simple.
High Availability. We wanted to ensure a high amount of uptime in this cloud. After battle testing ― by simulating full rack failures, and failures of edge networking with BGP failover ― we were able to deliver five 9’s uptimes to our workloads.
Single Pane Control. We utilized Platform9’s ability to segment teams and build tenants, providing global visibility and control over all of our accounts inside of Platform9 from a single pane of glass.

The Benefits

With the changes we have made, we are saving more than 60% of our hosting costs. In addition to this, the long-term benefits of being in control of our operating environment are huge. With the automation and management capabilities that come with Platform9, we were able to move our application seamlessly to the new cloud. We have a ways to go, but we are not missing AWS.

Ready to emulate Platform9 and achieve a cost effective, scalable cloud solution?

Let us show you how your applications can be hosted on a Platform9 enabled cloud. You can learn more about the benefits of Platform9 and contact us to schedule a free consultation to discuss how your enterprise can significantly reduce operational costs, increase scalability, and gain more visibility and control over your infrastructure operations.

Watch Gautam Jayapraskash, Director of Infrastructure and Operations & Cody Hill, Cloud Architect on “How Platform9 Left AWS, Ate its Own Dogfood, Saved Money and Scaled”

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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.