Platform9 Kubernetes Features

Core Kubernetes

Platform9 offers a fully managed CNCF certified Kubernetes platform, remotely installing, operating and maintaining customer clusters via a dedicated SaaS management plane. Capabilities offered include Catapult Remote Monitoring, self-healing clusters, automated-security patching of CVEs, multi-version support, and on demand upgrades.

On-premises and Edge

Create clusters on-premises or at the edge. Deployment options include: on top of bare metal, KVM VMs or VMware. Each cluster can be configured with advanced capabilities including:

• MetalLB supported by Platform9 for hassle-free load balancing in every cluster
• Luigi Network operator for workloads that require line-speed and low latency performance
• Single-node or multi-node (HA) control plane configurations that enable small-footprint clusters
• Bare metal cloud to bootstrap unprovisioned bare metal into fully functional clusters.
• Kubevirt to run VMs within a cluster thus consolidating virtual and container workloads

Multiple Cluster Upgrade Strategies

Choose the upgrade strategy that fits the customer’s specific availability needs:

• Sequential: node by node ensuring the most minimal disruption to service
• Percentage: to group nodes into batches, reducing the overall upgrade timeframe
• Advanced Batch: to discreetly upgrade nodes specified batches to ensure no interruption of service

Optionally, schedule a Platform9 CKE Support Engineer to proactively provide any help during your change window in the event of any issue impacting your applications.

SSO, Multi-tenancy & Cluster RBAC

Leverage your enterprise identity to grant role-based access to clusters with zero-setup.  SSO and multi-tenancy are natively integrated to each Kubernetes cluster’s RBAC configuration. Groups of users can then be quickly granted RoleBinding or ClusterRoleBinding permissions without the need to edit any YAML, enabling granular RBAC access to clusters and containerized workloads.

Customized RBAC configurations can be quickly deployed as a standard across clusters by creating and deploying a Profile via the Platform9 Profile Engine.

KubeConfig Generation

Deliver RBAC based self-service access to your developers so that they can work independently and securely on only their containerized applications while operations teams support clusters across multiple teams and business units.

Kubeconfig files can be downloaded directly from Platform9, supporting Token and Password based authentication.

Managed Add-ons with 24/7 Support

Platform9 delivers a set of critical Kubernetes Applications as managed cluster add-ons. Each add-ons’s lifecycle and configuration is managed by Platform9.  The following applications are included:

• Prometheus in-cluster Monitoring
• CoreDNS
• MetalLB 
• Kubernetes Dashboard
• Cluster Autoscaler 
• Calico CNI
• Flannel CNI
• etcd Backup
• Luigi Advanced Networking

Calico CNI

Open source Calico CNI is tightly integrated into Platform9 Kubernetes. Delivered as a fully supported software defined network, Platform9 installs, configures, upgrades and troubleshoots Calico. The SaaS platform extends Calico with a REST API that can remotely reconfigure Calito to simplify remote management in edge clusters.

Advance Networking

Run Telco/5G and high performance with confidence via the Luigi operator. Luigi simplifies advanced networking through Kubernetes native dynamic configuration of SR-IOV, DPDK, Multus, Device Plugins, IPVLAN, MacVlan. Luigi has been certified to run Container Networking Functions for 5G, 5G Core, 5G RAN, and IMS.

MetalLB Load Balancer for On-Premise & Edge Clusters

Built-in and fully supported by Platform9, MetalLB load balancer enables out of box service type load balancing on any cluster. Upgrades, patches and operational support are included out-of-the box.

In-Cluster Monitoring

Each cluster can be deployed with an instance of In-Cluster Monitoring that consists of  Prometheus, Alertmanager & Grafana, fully supported by Platform9. The deployment is pre-configured with core metrics covering the cluster, OS, Node and Kubernetes objects (Pods, PVC and more). Alarms are automatically centralized to your SaaS Management Plane providing a unified view of all active alarms across all clusters.

Etcd Backup and Encryption

Every cluster is built with Etcd backups pre-configured to ensure recovery from unplanned cluster outages.

Optionally, Etcd can be encrypted to increase the security of the cluster.

Profile Engine

The Profile Engine provides automated governance and policy management across clusters to ensure conformance to your standards. Simply create a desired state “Profile” from a known cluster configuration and then apply the Profile to any cluster. 

To expose non-conformance, the Drift Analytics engine quickly identifies and resolves changes in any cluster that may have become non compliant with its designated Profile.

App Catalog & Certified Apps

Helm is built-in to each Platform9 SaaS Management Plane, providing a configurable Application Catalog that users can leverage to deploy applications on their own. To speed up deployments and reduce the burden of tool management, Platform9 includes a set of certified applications that can be deployed onto any cluster.

Kubernetes IDE

Kubectl and YAML are not the only way to work with Kubernetes clusters and containerized applications. Platform9 provides real-time access to all cluster resources in easy to use dashboards. 

DevOps and Developers can quickly access detailed views of Pods, Deployments, ReplicaSets, CronJobs, Storage Classes, PVCs, and more.

Each deep-dive dashboard automatically maps in and connects related resources; Pods to Service, and exposes the ability to view events, logs and edit the resources yaml for fast updates and quick troubleshooting.

pf9ctl

Prefer the command line? – pf9ctl can get you up and running fast on-premises or at the edge. 

Deploy and upgrade clusters with a single command.

Qbert API

The Qbert REST API lets you automate cluster management, enabling advanced workflows such as integrating cluster life-cycle into your CI/CD process. Any action that is available in the Platform9 WebApp can be optionally executed via Qbert.