UPDATED 16:50 EDT / OCTOBER 21 2021

CLOUD

Platform9 helps fix the ‘cloud divide’ between public and private clouds

Founded in 2013, Platform9 Systems Inc., a software-as-a-service platform that offers hybrid cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes cluster management, has been on a mission to make it easier to run private hybrid and edge clouds for enterprises.

The reason this is important is because it’s actually harder to do than most might think, and public clouds can often have the advantage, according to Sirish Raghuram (pictured), co-founder and chief executive officer of Platform9.

“There is a cloud divide; the public clouds have figured out something that the rest of the industry has not, and people suffer with private clouds,” Raghuram said. “The public clouds … have a control plane which serves as … a foundation for them to launch a lot of services and make that really simple and easy to use. Who gives you a … cloud control plane to run private clouds or edge cloud or hybrid clouds? Nobody.”

Raghuram spoke with Lisa Martin and David Nicholson, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA. They discussed how Platform9 is helping companies use private and hybrid clouds in the best way possible. (* Disclosure below.)

Why public cloud has the advantage, and how to fix that

Named after the magical Platform 9 and 3/4 in the Harry Potter series, Platform9 wants to help bridge the private/public cloud divide. There’s a high demand for private and hybrid cloud options, according to Raghuram, however, very few companies can make private or hybrid cloud work, because they try to do it with a lot of handheld tools and limited automation skills. It’s also very hard to upgrade or troubleshoot in such an environment, and this can give public cloud an advantage.

“You need the automation that makes sure that ongoing troubleshooting, 24-by-7 alerting, upgrades to new versions are all fully managed,” Raghuram said. “When Amazon doesn’t upgrade to a new version, people don’t have to worry about it. You shouldn’t have to deal with that in your private cloud. The troubleshooting, the upgrades, the remediation when things go wrong that are taken for granted in the public cloud that we bring to the customers who want to run them in private or hybrid cloud environments.”

As an example of how customers benefit from Platform9, one of the company’s early customers was Snapfish LLC, which is a photosharing company. Snapfish used Platform9’s Managed OpenStack infrastructure as a service to help operate on OpenStack. Now, 85% of the company’s usage is containers, even though it never had to hire Kubernetes or OpenStack experts.

“The beauty of our model is, our control plane adds value,” concluded Raghuram. “It added value with OpenStack, it added value with Kubernetes, it’ll add value with what’s next around the evolution of serverless technologies. But it’s evergreen, and our customers get the benefit of all of that.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA(* Disclosure: This is an unsponsored editorial segment. However, theCUBE is a paid media partner for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2021. Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and other sponsors of theCUBE’s event coverage have no editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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