Freedom and Growth plans for Kubernetes from Platform9 lands

Platform9 announced the availability of new Freedom and Growth plans for their Platform9 Managed Kubernetes (PMK) Service. Users can sign up online for free with the Freedom plan and instantly deploy Kubernetes clusters of up to 20 nodes (800 vCPU’s). The Growth plan starts under $500/month, including an option for month-to-month payments, and provides 99.9% SLA and 24x7 support for up to 50 nodes (2000 vCPU’s). With both plans, users have the freedom to deploy Kubernetes clusters anywhere: from developer laptops, bare metal or virtual servers to public clouds and edge locations. In addition, users experience freedom from the complexity of day-2 operations - including automated upgrades, security patching, monitoring, and more.

Platform9’s Freedom and Growth plans are aimed at DevOps, ITOps, Platform Engineering, and cloud architects who are tasked with providing a stable self-service Kubernetes platform to their developers and:

• Want the freedom to use their existing infrastructure
• Do not want to be constrained by the lack of skills, time, and cost to build and operate the platform themselves
• Want the flexibility to start small, learn, test Kubernetes, and scale to production on their own terms and pace.

According to Gartner’s Best Practices for Running Containers and Kubernetes in Production (February 2019), “by 2022 more than 75 percent of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production, which is a significant increase from the fewer than 30 percent today.”

However, operationalizing Kubernetes in production can take months and enterprises are struggling to hire and retain high-caliber Kubernetes expertise. Furthermore, attrition creates a massive risk to the business. Platform9 addresses these operational and talent challenges with a unique approach that uses a SaaS delivery model to provide automated day-2 operations, robust SLA, and delightful user experience, backed by world-class Kubernetes certified support and customer success teams. By simply plugging-in their existing private or public environments (bare-metal OS, AWS, and Azure) to the SaaS Management Plane, users can create multi-master, multi-node Kubernetes clusters in under five minutes on any infrastructure with built-in ETCD backup, Prometheus monitoring, Grafana dashboards, and pre-configured RBAC capabilities, all of this without having to worry about day-to-day operational challenges.

Kubernetes developers and operations teams can choose from the following plans:

Freedom plan: For teams that are getting started with Kubernetes, the Freedom plan is a zero-cost plan that offers a capacity of up to 3 clusters and 20 nodes (or 800 vCPUs), community Slack support, and built-in critical alerting.

Growth plan: Teams can get started for under $500/month with a minimum of 3 nodes (120 vCPU’s)  and scale as they grow into large-scale production clusters, with a generous capacity of up to 50 nodes (or 2,000 vCPUs), 99.9% uptime SLA, and 24/7 support. Pricing is $160/node/month or $4/vCPU/month with annual billing; month-to-month plans are also available.

Enterprise plan: For organizations with large and complex infrastructure that require advanced and custom integrations with their existing data center or highly distributed edge infrastructure, this plan provides a white-glove service with designated account and customer success teams, weekly calls, quarterly reviews, and much more. Pricing is customized based on needs.
PMK Pricing Plans.png

Every plan comes with an extensive set of core features unmatched anywhere with the flexibility of scaling options, deployment choices, and SLA/support offerings.

“For DevOps teams that want to quickly get started with Kubernetes while ensuring an enterprise-grade experience that can scale with them on any infrastructure, it has never been easier to break free from the operational burdens of running Kubernetes in Production,” said Madhura Maskasky, Co-founder and VP of Product at Platform9. “Our fully-managed PMK plans automatically handle Day-2 operations, providing users with the peace of mind and freedom to scale from an individual developer to enterprise-grade Kubernetes management with no operational pain.”

“Platform9's latest Managed Kubernetes offerings align well with our belief that all complexities around Kubernetes can be abstracted and eventually eliminated,” said Anoop Balakuntalam, Head of HyScale.

"Combined with HyScale's app-centric abstraction over Kubernetes towards simplifying app deployments, the promised benefits of K8s are now within much easier reach of teams. We’re excited about the possibilities enabled by this combination of Platform9’s simplified Kubernetes cluster setup & management and HyScale’s deployment automation capabilities, making Kubernetes adoption pain-free." HyScale is provided by Pramati Prism, Inc.

“As more enterprises strategically move to Kubernetes-based infrastructure, there is increased demand for management, testing and rapid on-boarding of development teams,” said Raj Panchapakesan, Senior Director of Global Alliances for JFrog.

“Alongside community solutions like the JFrog Container Registry for advanced management of Docker images, Platform9 helps to fill this gap with flexible managed Kubernetes offerings.”