Platform9 Systems Inc. today added support for KubeVirt, an interface for running virtual machines alongside the encapsulated software environments called containers, to its platform for managing workloads with the Kubernetes container orchestrator.

Platform9 Managed KubeVirt is being released as an open-source project that gives users running those hybrid workloads a single control plane. The product is being released in a freemium version that has no dedicated support and limits the total number of supported clusters and nodes. The paid versions raise those capacity limits and add round-the-clock support.

Delivered as a service, Platform9 Managed KubeVirt should appeal in particular to industries like retail and telecommunications where edge data centers are space-constrained and businesses struggle to run two sets of servers.

“When you’re managing a lot of distributed micro-data centers, automation becomes extremely important,” said Madhura Maskasky, co-founder and vice president of product for Platform9. “We find users often a need to run side-by-side because they can’t put everything in containers or VMs.”

KubeVirt allows VMs and Kubernetes clusters to be managed with a single set of Kubernetes operatives. The service provides a raft of features: cloud-managed upgrades, automated VM monitoring using a built-in per-cluster Single Root I/O Virtualization and Open vSwitch-Data Plane Development Kit for improved network performance, resource utilization quotas, a single console for VM and Kubernetes operations, multitenancy support, standard VM management capabilities such as image and snapshot management, and security features such as role-based access control.

The company said it can also deliver bare-metal performance by eliminating the hypervisor penalty thanks to advanced networking functions to bypass transactions that would otherwise happen at the VM layer. Customers can choose to use existing VMware Inc. manage tools for VMs or switch to the KubeVirt interface.

Declarative operations are enabled through a console that enables users without much Kubernetes experience to define specifications with a simple user interface, Maskasky said. “But developers can also specify things in YAML under the covers,” she said. YAML, which stands for “YAML Ain’t Markup Language,” is a human-readable data serialization language commonly used for configuration.

Platform9 Managed KubeVirt is available immediately. “Kubevirt will be an important part of our product stack going forward,” Maskasky said.

Founded in 2013, Platform9 started out providing an as-a-service version of the OpenStack cloud infrastructure stack and later moved into software containers. The company has raised $74 million in venture funding.

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