News

Platform9 Takes on Large-scale 5G Kubernetes Deployments

• By John K. Waters
• April 1, 2021

Platform9 has released the latest version of its Platform9 Managed Kubernetes (PMK) product, a SaaS-managed service that combines OpenStack and Kubernetes.

PMK is designed to provide a simple tool for managing complex Kubernetes clusters, on-premises, in public clouds, or at the edge. The big news in this release is new support for advanced networking capabilities for large-scale 5G Kubernetes deployments, central management of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) clusters, and unified management of VMs and containers.

• The list of advanced networking capabilities includes:
• IPv6 support for all native services and users’ Kubernetes clusters
• API-driven automated IP address management (IPAM) out of the box
• Multiple high-performance networking options: SR-IOV, DPDK, PCI-pass-through, MACvLan, and IPvLAN
• A fully managed Kubernetes operator to automate the configuration of a host, its physical network, and all necessary Kubernetes components, without the need to access the host
• Advanced pod scheduling and deterministic performance with CPU-pinning, NUMA-aware scheduling, HugePages, Topology Manager, and CPU manager

With this release, DevOps engineers and cloud operators can connect and manage all their existing AWS EKS clusters from Platform9’s central management console. This feature enables operators to:

• Apply consistent governance policies to prevent “shadow” cluster creations and get visibility for security and cost management
• Deploy pre-configured Prometheus and Grafana for Monitoring of EKS clusters
• Leverage Platform9’s fully-managed Helm-service to deploy applications from public and private repositories

"Our latest product release addresses the specific challenges faced by DevOps and platform teams with distributed Kubernetes deployments in 5G infrastructure roll-outs, multi-cluster management in public clouds, and siloed management of VMs and containers," said Madhura Maskasky, VP of Platform9's product group, in a statement. "We continue to deliver these new capabilities through our Software-as-a-Service delivery model, which removes operational burden by offloading the complex tasks of deployment, support, upgrades, monitoring, and troubleshooting across all clusters, no matter where they are deployed."

Earlier this month, Platform9 announced a strategic partnership to extend its platform extended to manage container network functions (CNFs) deployed on Mavenir’s network infrastructure.