When it comes to transforming applications to cloud-native platforms, there’s no question that Kubernetes and containers have had a considerable impact. But that’s also posed challenges surrounding complexity.

Container management and orchestration solution provider Platform9 Systems Inc. built its model around solving those complex needs, and earlier this year, the company’s CRO discussed with theCUBE its vision for targeting Kubernetes complexity.

But much has happened since then, including the Platform9 Managed Kubernetes version 5.8 release and the company’s Managed KubeVirt, which allows users to run virtual machines side-by-side with containers on their Kubernetes clusters. The tagline, essentially, is to help users accelerate their existing legacy workloads and their new cloud-native workloads, all on the same underlying hardware footprint, according to Madhura Maskasky (pictured), co-founder and vice president of product at Platform9.

“Whether it’s in your private data centers or in a public cloud with a cost focus, cloud-native acceleration with cost focus is still the overall tagline, but there are details around how exactly 5.8, in a specific way, enables that for you,” she said.

Maskasky discussed those details, and other takeaways from this latest release, with theCUBE industry analyst Lisa Martin during an exclusive interview on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. (* Disclosure below.)

Seeking cost benefits

Platform9 was founded in 2013 by former VMware Inc. engineers. Last fall, the comany introduced Arlon as a way to bridge the gap between workload and infrastructure management. When it comes to 5.8, the company’s target audience was IT organizations. These organizations had lots of large existing virtualized environments that typically had VMware installed in them — or some of the other more traditional virtualization technologies or stacks, such as Apache CloudStack or OpenStack, according to Maskasky.

“Those are the target environments and target profiles for this release. What PMK with KubeVirt, with this 5.8 release, really enables is it allows you to [migrate] hundreds or thousands of your existing virtualized workloads,” she said.

For example, if a company has a large VMware environment on a traditional data center across one or multiple data centers, a migration plan and tooling, provided by Platform9, can be used to carve out a strategy to move all of that over to Kubernetes and KubeVirt with Platform9 and PMK.

Key solution and use cases

What are some of the key solutions or use cases that 5.8 is targeted to solve? There are really two common use cases, according to Maskasky. One is a traditional virtualized environment with a very heavy focus on cost saving.

“You’re a large enterprise running a virtualized environment. You want to continue using virtualization, but you want to cut your cost down by a third,” she said. “That’s, in general, a big theme today, given the macroeconomics. Cost savings is really top-of-mind for all enterprises. KubeVirt really plays extremely well into that narrative.”

That’s because KubeVirt gives users access to modern cloud-native virtualization technology, so users don’t need to compromise on key features, according to Maskasky.

The second key use case involves running edge environments and locations, potentially for telco customers or retail stores. The resource footprint or bandwidth at the edge site is always a challenge, according to Maskasky.

“You have maybe one, two, at the most, three physical servers, and you need to run your entire environment layer. Being able to run both VMs with containers on an edge location with limited resource footprint and bandwidth is another very key location,” she said. “We, in fact, have large-scale customers that use us with KubeVirt and Kubernetes for that use case today.”

Platform9 said it tested its product at scale for 5.8. Because the company has existing large-scale enterprise customers deploying at a high scale, the product gets tested regularly, according to Maskasky.

“For every release of Platform9’s products, whether it’s the 5.8 release or otherwise, we invest in a significant scale-testing exercise,” she said.

Some of the company’s customers are planning to run large-scale virtual network function workloads, relying on certain core network acceleration technologies, such as Data Plane Development Kit and single-root input/output virtualization.

“We invested in a very large-scale testing exercise with a large VM footprint on top, and we specifically tested for these networking heavy workloads,” Maskasky said.

When it came to one specific customer using CloudStack, the company found that the performance of components improved by about 300%.

“A pretty significant performance improvement compared to what they were used to and what they’ve been running so far,” Maskasky said.

Here’s the complete video interview with Madhura Maskasky:

(* 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