Introducing Platform9 Private Cloud Director

In this presentation, Roopak Parikh, CTO of Platform9, introduces the company’s new product, Private Cloud Director, which aims to address the challenges IT managers face when balancing between public and private cloud infrastructures. He begins by drawing an analogy to the Perigian spring tide, where the Earth, moon, and sun align to create extreme tidal forces, likening it to the pressures IT managers face from the rising costs of both public and private cloud solutions. Parikh shares an example of a large corporation that has been using public cloud for five years but found it too expensive, while their private cloud costs are also increasing. This situation, he explains, is common for many organizations that are trying to manage a mix of public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises infrastructure, including Kubernetes, virtual machines, and bare metal servers.

Platform9 has been in the industry for eight years, managing production workloads for various customers, and has developed a deep understanding of the complexities involved in running both virtualized and containerized environments. Parikh highlights that Platform9 has historically offered multiple products to cater to the private cloud market, and with their new Private Cloud Director, they are offering an enterprise-grade, production-ready solution that integrates both containers and virtualization. This solution is designed to be cost-effective and developer-friendly, addressing the needs of organizations that are struggling to manage their hybrid cloud environments. The product is built on years of experience managing large-scale infrastructures, including customers with over 10,000 physical servers and numerous clusters running both virtual machines and containers.

The Private Cloud Director offers three key elements, starting with virtualized clusters, which allow organizations to take their physical servers, virtualize them, and create multiple clusters. These clusters can be used for both virtual machines and containers, providing a unified infrastructure for different workloads. The solution also includes an extension framework that integrates services across both virtualized and containerized environments, offering a seamless experience. Traditionally, Platform9 has provided its solutions as a SaaS-managed service with “always-on assurance,” but they are now also offering a self-hosted version for organizations with specific security or sovereignty requirements. This flexibility allows organizations to choose the deployment model that best fits their needs while maintaining the benefits of a fully integrated cloud management solution.