As the cloud becomes more scalable, fragmentation is inevitable. This is leading to the need for the “supercloud.”

Madhura Maskasky (pictured), co-founder and vice president of product at Platform9 Systems Inc., recently spoke with theCUBE industry analyst John Furrier for a special CUBE Conversation. They discussed cloud-native at scale and how Platform9 fits into the supercloud picture with its new Arlon open-source project.

“If you think about a supercloud environment, there are at least few key ingredients that come to my mind that are really critical,” Maskasky said. “One is having a really good strategy for managing that scale. Then you need to complement that with the right kind of observability and monitoring tools at scale. You need some cost management tools. In my mind, these three things are the most necessary ingredients to make supercloud successful. And you know, Arlon is one of them.”

Arlon acts as a foundational enabler of this concept, because it is an open-source tool that prompts the configuration and management of clusters and infrastructure at scale. (* Disclosure below.)

Through the Arlon lens

By leveraging existing open-source components, Arlon is the assembly line of efficiency and consistency when managing distributed infrastructure, according to Maskasky, and it integrates and automates workload and infrastructure life cycle management.

“Arlon is an open-source project, a Kubernetes-native tool for complete end-to-end management of not just your clusters, but all of the infrastructure that goes within and along the sites of those clusters, security policies, your middleware plugins, and finally your applications,” Maskasky noted. “Arlon uses Argo CD, which is probably one of the highest rated and used CD open-source tools that’s out there.”

Open source is accelerating the supercloud narrative based on the confluence of ideas. As a result, developers get hands-on experience needed to propel the supercloud concept. Moreover, open source is a way of giving back to the community, according to Maskasky.

“One of the things that’s absolutely critical to us is that we take mainstream open-source technologies, components and then we make them available to our customers at scale through either a SaaS model or on-prem model,” she stated. “And also open source because we want the community to really first-hand engage with us on this problem, which is very difficult to achieve if your product is behind a wall, behind a black box.”

Supercloud is a perfect fit for cloud-native. This is based on the emergence of numerous micro sites, such as edge environment, on-prem infrastructure deployment, and public cloud deployment, according to Maskasky.

“I think there needs to be a different term than just multicloud or cloud,” she stated. “The reason is because as cloud-native and cloud deployments have scaled, I think we’ve reached a point now where instead of having the traditional data center style model, where you have a few large distributions of infrastructure and workload at a few locations, you have a large number of micro sites.”

Here’s the complete video interview, one of many CUBE Conversations from SiliconANGLE and theCUBE:

(* Disclosure: Platform9 Systems Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Platform9 nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE