Private cloud services company Platform9 Systems Inc. is extending its fully managed Kubernetes service with a new offering called Kubernetes Managed Apps.

Platform9 is a company that specializes in offering “managed” versions of some of the most popular open-source software used by enterprises today, offering what it calls “open-source-as-a-service.” It said it now wants to provide a fully managed service for some of the most critical components of the wider Kubernetes ecosystem, so companies can deploy and manage applications based on the popular container orchestration software more easily.

Organizations today are increasingly using Kubernetes to manage large deployments of containerized apps, which can be built once and run on any kind of hardware or computing platform. But Kubernetes alone isn’t enough, as they also need additional tools such as database, logging and monitoring services to get the most out of those apps.

Bare-bones Kubernetes is not sufficient by itself to enable an enterprise-ready comprehensive cloud-native infrastructure, Platform9 said. DevOps team must be able to deploy and manage more applications and services such as monitoring, tracing, logging, CI/CD, storage and databases.

Platform9 is offering fully managed versions of three Kubernetes services at launch, including Prometheus, which is an open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit used to monitor the health of Kubernetes apps. It’s also offering a combined service for Elasticsearch, Fluentd and Kibana, or EFK, which is used to collect, index, search and visualize log data. Last, there’s a managed version of the MySQL database, which is an open-source Structured Query Language database that’s similar to but less powerful than the Oracle database.

Platform9 said it’s offering managed versions of these services simply to make life easier for its customers, which may be more concerned with building their apps rather than worrying about the overhead of getting and keeping them up and running.

“Applications deployed on Kubernetes typically require integration with Prometheus for monitoring, EFK for logging and persistent storage for stateful deployments,” the company noted in a statement. “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.”

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said Platform9’s managed offerings could be enticing for enterprises as know-how with many of these technologies remains scarce and proven resources are hard to find.

“Doing things manually means that enterprises and their next-generation applications are dependent on the time and ability of the operations teams they have,” Mueller said. “And they may find that existing applications do not run successfully, or that code assets can’t be deployed in production. So the framework services and platform services offered by Platform9 will be welcomed by executives to ensure the success of their next-gen apps.”

The company said the above services are just the start and that it will add more Kubernetes tools in future. The Prometheus, EFK and MyQSL managed services are currently available from Platform9’s Managed Apps catalog in beta but will graduate to general availability once all of their capabilities achieve “production-readiness.”

“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,” Madhura Maskasky, cofounder and vice president of Product at Platform9, said in a statement.

Image: Platform9