Platform9 5.5 – It’s Time to Focus on Making Cloud Native Easy
Cloud native scale, availability, resilience and velocity done easy using Kubernetes and microservices. If only it was as simple as that. Install Kubernetes, deploy your containers and like magic, you get all benefits of cloud native immediately. Unfortunately cloud native isn’t just about the tooling. Kubernetes enables cloud native, it doesn’t deliver cloud native. Not without appropriate planning, architecture and enablement.
Over the last few months Platform9 has focused on making cloud native more open and accessible; open to DevOps and operators, and more importantly open to application developers. The Platform9 5.5 release opens up Kubernetes to everyone, with key features such as new dashboards for working with your apps, ArgoCD-as-a-Service for easy deployment of apps on your clusters, Catapult Remote Monitoring and an External Cluster Operator to bring in your EKS, AKS and GKE clusters. The Platform9 5.5 release makes it easier to learn, scale and develop apps in the cloud, on-premises and at the edge. No matter where you find yourself in your Kubernetes journey, Platform9 can help.
Release Notes: https://platform9.com/docs/kubernetes/release-notes
An IDE to Untangle the Web of Kubernetes Objects & Relationships
As a developer, one of the biggest challenges in moving to cloud native is understanding how your application runs at scale in a microservices architecture. This is where we focused in 5.5. PMK already has SSO and advance RBAC management features, so that the Administrators can ensure that Developers can securely access only their applications resources. With the enhancements made to our web UI in 5.5, Developers now have instant access to all the details about their Kubernetes objects and relationships centrally via the UI. For example, for a given Deployment, a developer can quickly view related service, pods, PVCs. They can see the pod status, logs and Kubernetes events, all kept in-context and automatically mapped to their related objects. This saves a ton of troubleshooting time running the right kubectl commands to get all this information! No more guessing which pod is related to which service. And if you need to quickly tweak the manifest, the YAML is available to be edited and updated directly in the cluster.
Workloads StatefulSet Details
Workloads Pods Container Logs
Workloads Pods YAML
Integrated Continuous Delivery with ArgoCD-as-a-Service
To further simplify developing and deploying cloud native applications, we have expanded our portfolio of services to include integrated continuous delivery, with a brand new early access offering of ArgoCD-as-a-Service!
To troubleshoot an application, you first needs to deploy it, a task normally reserved for administrators. Starting today, cluster administrators can enable developers to deploy applications without ever running ‘kubectl apply’ or ‘helm install’ again. The 5.5 release includes ArgoCD provided as a hosted service. All your PMK clusters are automatically connected to the hosted ArgoCD instance, so all that is required is your Git Repository. Once you connect the hosted ArgoCD instance to a Git Repo or a Helm Repo, your applications can be deployed, scaled, upgraded and removed without any interaction from cluster administrators and without provisioning unnecessary access to developers. Zero-setup Continuous Delivery as-a-Service.
External Cluster Operator
The 5.5 release doesn’t stop there, the release includes all new capabilities for managing EKS, AKS and GKE clusters, and the introduction of Catapult Monitoring. The new External Cluster Operator (ECO) creates a secure communication tunnel between your EKS, AKS or GKE clusters and Platform9. Once set up, operators can leverage Platform9’s managed in-cluster monitoring, use ArgoCD with zero-setup, and quickly provision user access to any cluster without ever needing to add users to the hyperscaler’s cloud.
Catapult – Proactive Remote Monitoring Enhanced
With all the focus on cloud native application development you might think we forgot about the PlatformOps and DevOps teams. Rest assured we did not. An important part of Platform9’s SaaS capabilities have always been remote management and monitoring; SaaS means you don’t install Platform9 ever, and as its SaaS we operate services that remotely support your clusters, and if anything fails, our support team is notified 24/7. The 5.5 release opens up our remote monitoring to all users, Freedom, Growth and Enterprise Tier, and extends the remote monitoring to include over 50 new alerts. The new alerts cover key elements such as, etcd, Kubernetes API Server, Nodes, Workloads, CNI and Platform9 managed add-ons. No matter where you run your clusters, at the edge, on-premises or in the public cloud, Catapult Remote Monitoring provides 24/7 coverage for your environment, with alerts that inform our support and your operations teams of any issues.
In Summary
Platform9’s latest release 5.5 takes some key steps towards our vision of making cloud native more easy and accessible to everyone. Watch out for more enhancements coming to all these areas through our upcoming releases.
If you’re not a Platform9 user can you start with our Freedom plan; 2 clusters, up to 8 nodes and free forever. Signup at www.platform9.com/signup
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