Top 10 Private Cloud and Hybrid Cloud platforms

Important news about Private Cloud and Hybrid Cloud platforms

2022. Platform9 raises $26M to help manage distributed cloud clusters



Platform9, which describes itself as an “open distributed cloud company,” has completed a $26 million funding round. Platform9 provides open-source virtualization solutions by enabling developers to run Kubernetes — the open-source platform for managing self-contained workloads — and other cloud-native technologies on distributed cloud services. It integrates with existing infrastructure to create cloud-native clusters that include monitoring features and connect with third-party tools. In this context, “cluster” refers to a group of worker machines, known as nodes, that operate apps “containerized” with the dependencies and services required to run them.


2020. Microsoft brings data services to its Arc multi-cloud management service



Microsoft has unveiled a significant update to its Arc multi-cloud service, which enables Azure customers to operate and oversee workloads across various clouds — including those of Microsoft's rivals — and their on-premises data centers. Initially announced at Microsoft Ignite in 2019, Arc was always intended not only to assist users in managing their servers but also to enable them to run data services like Azure SQL and Azure Database for PostgreSQL, close to where their data resides. Today, the company is fulfilling this promise with the preview release of Azure Arc-enabled data services, including support for, as anticipated, Azure SQL and Azure Database for PostgreSQL. Additionally, Microsoft is making the core feature of Arc, Arc-enabled servers, widely available. These are the tools at the heart of the service that allow organizations using the standard Azure Portal to manage and monitor their Windows and Linux servers across their multi-cloud and edge environments.

2020. Azure Arc brings its Kubernetes service into public preview



In a move that would make even the most jaded galactic hitchhiker raise an eyebrow, Microsoft has proclaimed that its marvelously ambitious Azure Arc—a service so bold it dares to manage cloud resources not only across Microsoft’s own ethereal expanse but also in rival realms like AWS, GCP, and even Red Hat’s Open Shift—has now decided to sprinkle its cosmic dust onto Kubernetes. Yes, Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes is now frolicking in public preview, empowering users to wrangle Kubernetes clusters from their data centers, edge outposts, and those nebulous public clouds. As if that weren’t enough to make the Vogons write poetry, Arc now also extends a digital handshake to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and the SUSE CaaS Platform, proving once again that Microsoft is not just playing 4D chess but perhaps inventing a whole new board game entirely.


2019. VMware completes $2.7 billion Pivotal acquisition



VMware has completed the $2.7 billion acquisition of private cloud platform Pivotal. The acquisition provides VMware with an additional element in its effort to evolve from a purely virtual machine company into a cloud-native provider capable of managing infrastructure wherever it exists. It complements other recent transactions such as the acquisitions of Heptio and Bitnami, two other deals finalized this year. They aim for these acquisitions to integrate seamlessly into VMware Tanzu, which is intended to unify Kubernetes containers and VMware virtual machines within a single management platform.


2019. AWS Outposts brings Amazon cloud to data center



Amazon announced the general availability of Outposts—a private cloud hardware stack that they install in your data center. Certain tasks, such as operating a factory, require computing resources to be nearby due to low-latency needs. Outposts is designed to address this, where similar existing solutions have fallen short due to a lack of seamless integration between on-premises hardware and the cloud. The hardware comes with a range of services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, Amazon ECS, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service and Amazon EMR. Amazon is joining Microsoft and Google, which already offer their own hybrid cloud solutions: Azure Arc and Google Anthos.


2015. VMware will make Google Cloud Platform available to its customers



Google is partnering with VMware to make select Google Cloud Platform offerings accessible to VMware clients through vCloud Air, VMware’s hybrid cloud solution. Google BigQuery analytics, Google Cloud Storage, as well as Google’s Datastore and DNS services, will be available via vCloud Air later this year, with additional Google services possibly being introduced thereafter. Depending on implementation, both companies could benefit. VMware gains access to four Google services, including the powerful BigQuery analytics, to attract enterprise customers. Google gets to showcase some of its top technologies to the enterprise cloud audience it seeks. Google needs a stronger hybrid cloud presence and VMware needs to demonstrate that its cloud can compete with the major players (or player, referring to Amazon Web Services).


2014. Apprenda teams with Piston to gain OpenStack support



Enterprise Platform as a Service provider Apprenda, originally focused on .NET and Windows but now expanded to include other languages and technologies, has partnered with Piston Cloud (creator of the private CloudOS) to join the OpenStack ecosystem. Together, Apprenda and Piston will provide a closely integrated solution that allows agile software development teams to build Java and .NET cloud applications and microservices more rapidly in a genuine hybrid cloud setting. As more enterprise developers turn to both PaaS and OpenStack solutions, delivering a robust combined offering is a logical step.


2014. Mesosphere unveiled new data center OS



Mesosphere announced that its highly anticipated data center operating system has been launched as a private beta and will be accessible to the public in early 2015. The new cloud OS, named DCOS, addresses the challenge of managing all the machines in a data center as a single, large computer. Similar to how an operating system on a personal computer can allocate resources to all installed applications, DCOS aims to perform the same function across the data center. This approach is based on the fact that today's powerful data-processing applications and services — such as Kafka, Spark and Cassandra — span multiple servers, unlike older applications like Microsoft Excel. Configuring and maintaining each individual machine to support these new distributed applications is a significant task, according to Apache Mesos co-creator and recent Mesosphere recruit Benjamin Hindman.


2014. Mirantis gets $100M funding to become enterprise OpenStack leader



Commercial OpenStack distribution provider Mirantis announced $100M in Series B funding. OpenStack is an open-source platform for deploying infrastructure as a service. Mirantis aims to become the OpenStack equivalent of what Red Hat is to Enterprise Linux. In other words, they aspire to be the corporate representative of the project. They will likely need every bit of that funding, given the strong competition from companies like HP, IBM, Cisco and, indeed, Red Hat, all vying for a share of the enterprise OpenStack market. Just a few weeks ago, Red Hat declared its shift from client-server to cloud computing with a focus on OpenStack.


2014. Microsoft Azure appliance makes comeback



Microsoft is introducing a new Azure appliance that companies or service providers can implement in their own data centers. Named the Cloud Platform System, the new appliance will operate with the same Azure APIs, services, hypervisor and all other components as the Azure public cloud and will be able to connect seamlessly to the Azure public cloud. The appliance is particularly notable given Microsoft’s prior experiments with the concept of Azure appliances. It had earlier proposed selling appliances to several large service provider partners such as HP and even initiated a program to assist web hosts in launching their own versions of Azure. Both initiatives seem to have faded away for various business and technical reasons, but now the appliance is making a return.