DEVOPSdigest

Platform9 announced Kubernetes Managed Apps, a new offering that extends Platform9 fully-managed Kubernetes service and SLA guarantee to also cover a set of critical Kubernetes services and tools - such as monitoring, logging, database services, and more.

Platform9 offers SaaS-managed Kubernetes service with 99.9 percent SLA on any environment (on-premises or hybrid clouds) for both the Kubernetes infrastructure and the application tiers.

Kubernetes Managed Apps enables self-service consumption, white-glove experience and seamless Day-2 operations for these applications - at scale - all backed by Platform9's 99.9% SLA.

Per customer demand, the first set of fully-managed applications to be offered are:

- Managed Prometheus: Platform9 Managed Prometheus provides Dev and Ops teams with easy deployment and configuration of the Prometheus stack and the Alert Manager as a multi-tenant service. The service is HA-ready, with all persistent storage, automatic backups and recovery handled automatically, with no need for Admin intervention.

- Managed EFK: The first introduced Fluentd would soon be followed by Elastic and Kibana for an integrated managed EFK service for logging and indexing.

- Managed MySQL: The popular relational database for stateful Kubernetes applications would be delivered using Percona's MySQL offering.

Additional applications will be added on an ongoing basis in future releases.

Each managed app provides one-click deployment for developers while giving Operations teams the governance they require to manage security, access controls, and capacity across the entire organization.

- Self-service: Users will be able to choose from a variety of applications available in the Kubernetes Managed Apps Catalog.

- Batteries included: Applications deployed on Kubernetes typically requires integration with Prometheus for monitoring, EFK for logging, persistent storage for stateful deployments, etc. Managed Apps offering provides these core services as built-in capabilities, provided out of the box for each deployed managed application. This way, self-service users do not need to worry about installing and configuring these dependencies while deploying their specific app instance. In addition, monitoring and logging of each managed app is enhanced to incorporate system-level metrics around resource utilization of the app, with no involvement or configuration required from end users.

- Integrated, end-to-end SLA: This covers the lifecycle management of the managed application instances - including version compatibility and upgrades across all instances - as well as all the dependent components required to run the managed app. This includes 24/7 proactive monitoring around application uptime, auto-detection and correction of failures that the app instance might run into, security patching, performance guarantee, support by Platform9 Kubernetes Certified Engineers and Application experts, and more.

- Support for multi-tenant, multi-cluster or dedicated instances deployments: IT Ops can easily deploy and configure any managed application available in the catalog in a multi-tenant, multi-cluster fashion, or as dedicated instances per each cluster. For example, they can enable Prometheus monitoring on all clusters, with a click of a button. That way, as more applications are developed, they are enabled with monitoring out of the box, with no additional overhead.

- Full RBAC capability for individual namespaces or cluster-wide enables IT Ops to easily let developers access and self-service their own managed applications.

- Simple UI or Kubectl CLI: All managed applications can be deployed and administered either through a simple UI or with the native Kubectl CLI interface - instead of having to deal with separate, complex YAML or other configuration files/tools for each service.

- Operations teams benefit from centralized visibility, management and governance across all Kubernetes services - such as monitoring, logging, storage, service mesh, and more.

Each new managed application introduced in the Managed Apps catalog will first be released in a "Beta" phase and will gradually progress to the "Fully-managed" level as it matures, and all supported capabilities graduate into production-readiness.

SLAs for the individual apps would be complementary to the SLA that Platform9 already provides for the Kubernetes infrastructure itself. Depending on the complexity of the managed application chosen, the SLA and fully-managed functionality may also cover additional capabilities--such as cross-geo disaster recovery for databases and advanced integrated services with other complementary managed applications offered, automatic backup/recover, auto-scaling, and more.

Being an open platform, built on upstream open source technology, Platform9 is leveraging the capabilities in the Kubernetes community, including Kubernetes Operators. These are extended, for various managed applications, to allow organizations to benefit from a fully managed service and SLA, without having to deal with the overhead and complexity of managing multiple applications, operators, and their inter-dependencies for production deployments. This enables enterprises to easily adopt both Kubernetes--and Kubernetes applications--at scale, with no management overhead for the underlying infrastructure stack or its related services and tools.

"The rising complexity associated with adopting Kubernetes infrastructure and related applications creates a business need for developers and IT Ops teams to have self-service consumption and governance for all related tools and services around the core infrastructure," said Madhura Maskasky, Co-Founder and VP of Product at Platform9. "Kubernetes Managed Apps is designed to strategically tackle this challenge by extending Platform9's seamless management experience of Kubernetes Day-2 operations to the applications themselves, eliminating the need for DevOps teams to become experts in these related tools and services."