Platform9, founded in 2013 from former VMware Engineers Sirish Raghuram (former Staff Engineer and now Platform9’s CEO), Madhura Maskasky (also former Staff Engineer and now Head of Product), Roopak Parikh (former Staff MTS at VMware and now Head of Engineering) and Bich Le (former Principal Engineer at VMware and now Chief Architect), exits today from stealth mode announcing its homonymous SaaS cloud management platform that promises to transform the on-premise servers infrastructures into an AWS-like private clouds.
This new platform aims to reduce operational complexity offering non-disruptive setup and upgrades, a single pane of glass (unified management) for KVM, Docker (which is becoming more and more relevant) and VMware vSphere (but currently only KVM is supported), a native support for teams collaboration and a solid OpenStack base (which translates into an OpenStack controller, with Nova, Keystone and Glance modules, that you have to install into your on-premise infrastructure to provide the management stack).
Platform9, that can claim among its advisors Hans Robertson (Meraki Founder), Bogomil Balkansky (former Sr. Vice President, Cloud Infrastructure Products at VMware) and Caroline McCrory (Sr. Director of Research at Gigaom), received a $4.5 million Series A funding from Redpoint Ventures that will be invested to further accelerate its roadmap and growth.
Some details from the press release:
How IT Benefits
- Non-Disruptive Setup and Upgrades: Administrators can import their existing servers and workloads non-disruptively within minutes. Upgrades are as easy as clicking a button in the User Interface and letting Platform9 do the rest.
- Richer Visibility: Platform9 dashboards provide rich visibility and insight into an organization’s private cloud, across infrastructure, workloads and users. Platform9 works across datacenters and geographies, eliminating management silos.
- Automation and Policy Control: Platform9 pools together servers, storage and networking into a private cloud that can be shared by teams of users. Platform9’s intelligent placement technology ensures optimal hardware utilization, enforces capacity quotas and enables administrators to express rich policies for tiered consumption of resources.
- Support for Diversity: Platform9 lets administrators mix and match Docker, KVM and VMware vSphere seamlessly, enabling them to choose the best virtualization or container technologies for their applications.
How Developers Benefit
- Self-Service Access: Developers get UI and API based self-service access to their private cloud. They can rapidly provision and access instances without waiting on human intervention. Developers can easily automate their build/test/release pipeline by leveraging OpenStack APIs or libraries.
- Support for Collaboration: Platform9 makes collaboration between team members and across different teams easy and intuitive with native support for creation of shared environments to rapidly provision and destroy instances. This enables faster resolution of problems between development and QA teams.