Tech Field Day 13 Preview: Platform9

Tech Field Day is drawing closer and I’ve really enjoyed the opportunity to dig into vendors during these previews. I have definitely found some products I wish I had known about during one struggle or another. Platform9 is such a vendor. Launched in 2014 by a group of former VMware employees, Platform9 has a goal of bringing OpenStack and Kubernetes Containers to an organization while utilizing their existing investments in hardware and virtualization. Setting up a private cloud from scratch can be rough. Even if you get it configured correctly you still need expertise to support and update the environment.

Platform9 responds to these concerns by offering a managed private cloud which can be up and running within 10 minutes. Using their Getting Started guide, you can download into an existing VMware environment and register to their cloud management portal in minutes. That portal can support multiple sites and is monitored by Platform9 to meet SLAs and help you troubleshoot. They own the patching process and run on any hardware supported by the VMware HCI. Lastly, they can use your existing VMware templates as Glance images, saving you even more setup time.

I have some sort of odd fascination with OpenStack. I love the idea of having the open source, self service, AWS-like cloud provisioning in my datacenter. Linux isn’t my greatest strength so building my own was harder than I expected. If I had known about a product like Platform9 I may have had a successful trial. Knowing they will use existing hardware and don’t require a greenfield is also intriguing. I can’t wait to see them at Tech Field Day and hear about their plans for 2017.