Platform9 announced a new $22 million Series C round of funding on June 28, bringing total funding to date for the managed cloud services vendor up to $36.5 million. The new round was led by Canvas Ventures and included the participation of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE), Redpoint Ventures and Menlo Ventures.
Platform9 first emerged from stealth in August 2014, with a service to help organizations manage their own OpenStack private clouds. The company added managed Kubernetes container orchestration in January 2017 and is currently working on building out a serverless offering called Fission, to compete against Amazon’s Lambda service. The new funding will be used by Platform9 to continue to grow both technology and marketing efforts.
“We have seen a significant growth in revenue over the past two years,” Madhura Maskasky, co-founder of Platform9, told eWEEK. “We have had 300 percent revenue growth and the customer base has grown as well.”
In terms of where new customers are coming from, Maskasky said that she’s not seeing a lot of direct migration of VMware users over to the managed Kubernetes service.
“Our customers tend to be in the later stage of their evaluation of different container platforms,” Maskasky said.
Maskasky added that some of the customers have already tried to run Kubernetes on their own and had some challenges dealing with the complexity. There are also customers that have Mesosphere container orchestration deployments and have decided they want to move to Kubernetes. Maskasky said that Platform9 is also seeing migrations from Amazon, with some organizations deciding they want to invest in a cloud-neutral stack.
Hybrid Cloud
Platform9 also supports the OpenStack Omni effort which aims to enable hybrid cloud management, from an OpenStack base. Omni started off supporting just Amazon Web Services and will soon add new public cloud support. Maskasky said that Platform9 has been working to expand Omni, with support for Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform set to debut in the coming months.
“Omni has been a very strategic initiative for Platform9,” Maskasky said. “Having an OpenStack infrastructure that enables the consumption of both public and private cloud resources makes a lot of sense to us.”
Serverless
The emerging market for serverless capabilities has largely been driven to date by Amazon’s Lamda service. IBM is also active in the market with its OpenWhisk serverless approach which is now available on the IBM Bluemix platform.
Plaform9’s open-source Fission effort provides a serverless, event-driven services model on top of Kubernetes. Unlike Lambda or IBM’s OpenWhisk, Platform9 does not yet provide commercial support for Fission.
“We definitely plan on commercializing Fission at some point in the future, but we don’t have a concrete timeline that we’re currently sharing publicly now,” Maskasky said. “Even though Fission as a commercial service is not available, we make it very easy for any Platform9 that is running managed Kubernetes to run Fission on top.”
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.