Platform9 Self Managed Cloud Platform (SMCP) Introduction

Platform9 Self Managed Cloud Platform (SMCP) is a comprehensive, securely deployed product suite that provides a fully automated and centrally managed cloud experience across thousands of edge sites. Platform9 SMCP is designed as an end-to-end solution that supports edge computing uses cases for industries such as Telco, Retail, Media, CDN, SASE etc.

SMCP supports two deployment options today. SMCP can be deployed either as a SaaS Managed platform - for remote connected management of thousands of sites, or as a secure on-premises air-gapped deployment - useful for environments where outbound internet connectivity is intermittent or not available at all.

Overview & Components

Platform9 SMCP is powered by Kubernetes along with a number of cloud native components in the Kubernetes ecosystem.

The following diagram provides a simplified overview of Platform9 Edge Cloud. It highlights various components that are part of the Edge Cloud offering and their relationship to each other.

Following is a list of SMCP features and components:

1. Managed Kubernetes - One of the key components of SMCP is a built-in Managed Kubernetes layer. SMCP enables you to run your Kubernetes clusters on physical servers on your on-premises data centers, at a remote edge site, or on public clouds across multiple geographic regions. SMCP provide complete lifecycle management for your clusters. You can create product ready highly available clusters that can auto scale to accommodate your application requirements.
2. Ironic and Metal³ - SMCP has a full bare metal orchestration layer, powered by open source Ironic and Metal3. SMCP can remotely boot servers that are racked and stacked using PXE, IPMI or Redfish, deploy and redeploy operating system, configure networking, then install Kubernetes, at scale with a single command. This lets architects and DevOps teams automate and standardize deployments across thousands of edge sites while removing the human error element from individual deployments.
3. Native Virtualization Support with Kubevirt - SMCP comes with full featured support for Kubevirt - enabling virtual machines to run side by side with containers on SMCP enabled Kubernetes clusters at your edge sites. You can run containers on VMs, containers side by side with VMs, or both, at your data center or remote edge site. SMCP thus enables a Retail enterprise to run Point of Sale (POS) applications as VMs, side by side with other containerized applications for store digitization at each store location. SMCP enables Telecommunications Providers to run Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) along with Containerized Network Functions (CNFs) on a unified stack at remote Radio cell tower locations and at core sites.
4. Luigi Advanced Edge Networking - Enabled for both VMs and containers, the Luigi Advanced Edge Networking layer packages a number of networking features specifically designed to enable low latency high performance networking at line speed. The layer includes capabilities and plugins such as Multus-CNI, IPV6. IPAM support, and several network acceleration features such as SRIOV, DPDK, MACvLAN, IPvLAN.
5. Observability and Profile engine – As the number of edge sites increases, it becomes more difficult to ensure consistent deployment and configuration of infrastructure, clusters and applications at scale. The Platform9 Profile Engine enables GitOps style automation by allowing users to describe desired state configuration for clusters. It then monitors your environment and reports any noncompliance, thus ensuring consistency, compliance, and standardization across your distributed application footprint.
6. Private Container Registry - SMCP comes with a built-in private docker container registry that runs at the management plane layer. This enables easy deployment of your applications packaged as container images at remote edge sites from the management plane, without requiring internet connectivity to download the container images.
7. (Optional) Air-gapped deployment and management for 5G– SMCP supports two deployment models today. SMCP can be deployed either as a SaaS Managed platform - for remote connected management of thousands of sites, or as a secure on-premises air-gapped deployment - useful for environments where outbound internet connectivity is intermittent or not available at all. SMCP air-gapped deployment is powered by Airctl - Platform9's on-premise air-gapped Kubernetes orchestrator, that comprises of a useful command-line utility and related functions that manage the lifecycle of the on-premise SMCP management plane.
8. Guaranteed 99.9% uptime SLA (for SaaS deployment of SMCP only) – When deployed in SaaS deployment mode, SMCP delivers closed-loop automation for day-2 operations of all edge sites through remote monitoring, alerting, auto-troubleshooting, and proactive issue resolution by our support experts that are available globally 24/7.

Benefits

SMCP provides several benefits to simplify enterprise edge deployments at scale.

Faster time to market – Operationalize edge locations in days instead of months using end to end automation enabled by SMCP.

Reduced operational costs – Maintain edge locations with little additional staffing. Reduce time spent on low-level infrastructure tasks and special skills. PEC enables administrators to remotely implement, administer, update, and observe large scale distributed edge deployments from centralized self service user interface.

Infrastructure flexibility – Leverage existing infrastructure investments already in place.

Self-service API automation – Provide developers with self-service capabilities so they can automate application deployment with API-driven CI/CD allowing them to centrally push their VM- or container-based applications to the cloudlets at a click of a button.

Open source freedom – Leverage innovation of open source technologies without the operational burden.

Self-Service API

SMCP comes with a fully documented REST API. Using PEC, users can automate cluster creation and lifecycle management, application deployment, and end-to-end CI/CD integration.

Security

SMCP works off the CISA recommended Zero Trust Security model. This allows users to uniquely define an increasingly granular user/group policy specification. SMCP integrates with your organization's existing Single-Sign On (SSO) solution to enable SSO across distributed infrastructure locations. In a SaaS managed deployment of SMCP, security patches and rolling updates / upgrades for your Kubernetes clusters are auto-delivered to ensure security conformance. For air-gapped deployment of SMCP, patches and updates are delivered at a pre-defined regular cadence to enable you to ensure full compliance wrt your organization's security policies.

Support

SMCP is backed by Platform9's world-class support and customer success organization, consisting of multiple Certified Kubernetes Administrators that are experts on all things Kubernetes and are ready to assist you when needed. Our support teams are organized, trained, and equipped to handle complex issues with containers, Kubernetes, and related ecosystem components leveraged by our stack or your applications, at scale, and at remote sites.