Private cloud services vendor Platform9 Systems Inc. is getting into the container game, introducing support for Kubernetes on its managed OpenStack offering.

Founded by a bunch of ex-VMware Inc. engineers back in 2013, Platform9 is a fairly unique and interesting vendor in that it focuses on customer’s existing infrastructure and transforms infrastructure into an agile, self-service private cloud. The company claims it can help organizations of any size to take their existing servers and transform them into AWS-like resources.

It’s debatable of course that Platform9 can do everything AWS can, but at least it does now support software containers, thanks to yesterday’s beta launch of its managed Kubernetes product. As anyone familiar with containers knows, Kubernetes is an incredibly popular open-source orchestration platform that’s used to manage containers. It was designed and built by Google to manage its own massive infrastructure, something that’s done its credibly the world of good as its gained massive traction since its release a couple of years ago.

Platform9 says its Kubernetes service “makes it easy to orchestrate containerized workloads while providing mission-critical features for deploying and managing Docker containers in production and at scale”

Supporting Kubernetes is a smart move for Platform9 because the technology fulfills an important role for developers using software containers. As a management framework it’s one of the best and most reliable, providing essential features such as application lifecycle management, load balancing and service discovery. It also offers a bevy of advanced features for more sophisticated users, such as multi-tenancy support for policy and governance, persistent storage, isolated networking, image management, single sign-on (SSO), and role-based access control (RBAC). Now, Platform9 is offering all this, together with the uptime and stability guarantees one would expect from a “managed service”.

“For forward-looking organizations that are taking a containerized approach to applications for greater agility and efficiency, Kubernetes provides a powerful orchestration framework for DevOps workflows,” Madhura Maskasky, co-founder and vice president of product at Platform9, said in a statement. “Platform9 Managed Kubernetes simplifies and supercharges orchestration with operational capabilities and service-level guarantees that make it quick, easy and affordable for enterprises to deploy and run containers at scale in production.”

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