Free Tier FAQ
The Platform9 Managed Kubernetes Freedom Tier is our free-forever plan that provides access to many of the core features of PMK. PMK enables you to deploy, upgrade and manage your Kubernetes clusters from one central location. The Freedom Plan supports up to 2 Clusters with a maximum of 10 nodes each (tip! 3 Masters + 7 Workers is a perfect combination) on Bare Metal, AWS, or Azure.
We built the Freedom Plan to enable developers, DevOps, ITOps, really anyone, to experience burden free Kubernetes infrastructure.
To get started, choose your infrastructure and follow the guide.
How is the Free Tier Different from PMK Paid Tiers?
PMK Paid Tiers are our fully managed Kubernetes offerings that have no cluster limits, an available SLA and access to our Kubernetes certified support team. Our support team will proactively maintain your environments and are on-call to fix your Kubernetes infrastructure issues when you need them.
The Free Tier enables you to experience many of the PMK features with support provided by our community of users. You can ask questions on the Platform9 Community, reach out on Slack or email Platform9 Free Tier Questions.
Account Suspend and Resume
Freedom plan runs 24/7, and is completely free forever. To provide this service for free, and ensure users can leverage Managed Kubernetes in a flexible manner. Platform9 scales inactive accounts to zero running pods without data loss, this is known as account suspension. An account is marked as inactive after 7 consecutive days of inactivity and is also running with zero nodes or clusters attached.
A suspended account can be resumed by accessing any Platform9 API or visiting the instance and attempting to log in.
Feature Comparison
Below is a comparison of PMK Paid Plans and Freedom Plan capabilities.
| Feature | PMK Freedom Plan | PMK Paid Plans |
|---|---|---|
| API (CI/CD & Automation) | Yes | Yes |
| Fully Automated K8s Install | Yes | Yes |
| Autoscaling | Yes | Yes |
| Scale BareOS (VM's/Bare Metal) | Yes | Yes |
| Load Balancers | Yes | Yes |
| CNI Support | Yes | Yes |
| Clusters | ||
| Total Number of Clusters | 2 | Unlimited* |
| Master Nodes per Cluster | 1, 3 or 5 | Unlimited* |
| Worker Nodes per Cluster | 1 to 9 | Unlimited* |
| Supported Clouds | ||
| BareOS | Ubuntu & CentOS | Ubuntu & CentOS |
| AWS | Yes | Yes |
| Azure | Yes | Yes |
| Platform9 Managed Observability | ||
| Per Cluster Monitoring | Yes | Yes |
| Self-Service Alerting | Coming Soon | Coming Soon |
| Rule Customization | Coming Soon | Coming Soon |
| Platform9 Support | ||
| Access to Platform9 Support | Not Available | Available |
| Platform9 SLA | No | Yes |
| Platform9 Upgrades | ||
| PMK Upgrades | Yes | Yes |
| Kubernetes Upgrades | Yes | Yes |
| Integration with Platform9 Managed Bare Metal# | ||
| Integrated | No | Yes |
| BareMetal Cloud | No | Yes |
Usage of Platform9 Managed Kubernetes (PMK) is subject to licensing restrictions. Usage limits are set by the defined licensed quantity purchased. Platform9 Managed Bare Metal is not included within the PMK license and must be purchased separately. Terms and conditions apply.
Free Tier Inactivity
This article describes what happens to your Platform9 Managed Kubernetes (PMK) Free Tier account upon inactivity.
Account Suspension
PMK Free Tier is fully featured and free forever, as long as you have at least one node attached to and authorized with the PMK management plane, and there is at least one Kubernetes cluster running.
When an account is detected to have no nodes that are responding and/or no Kubernetes clusters, the account is marked as inactive.
After 7 days of inactivity, the account is scheduled to be suspended. A suspended account has all its management plane services in a paused state.
Resuming a Suspended Account
Free Tier accounts with zero nodes that are responding and / or zero clusters are marked inactive and then suspended after 7 consecutive days of inactivity.
To resume an account simply access it via PMK UI or API (Visit the account and attempt to login)
It will take between two to five minutes for a suspended account to fully resume.
You can resume a suspended account by accessing the account via PMK UI or the PMK REST API. Note that the process to resume an account takes between two and five minutes. You will experience the delay when you first attempt to access your account after it has been suspended. Once the account is fully resumed, any further operations on it should succeed directly.