Platform9 Introduces Arlon: An Open Source Project To Enable Cloud Native Scale

Platform9 announced the launch of its latest open source project, Arlon. Arlon defines a powerful unified architecture that leverages GitOps, declarative APIs, and Kubernetes to manage and reconcile state of both infrastructure (clusters and underlying resources) as well as workloads (apps and configurations).

Arlon is the first open-source project to fully automate and integrate infrastructure and workload lifecycle management while enabling scale, compliance, and security through reusable profiles and groupings.

With Arlon, developers and DevOps teams can simplify scalable deployments at lower costs. Enterprise IT teams can apply consistent governance policies regardless of where the clusters are deployed.

Challenges of disjointed workload and application management and scale

“In a typical organization with many DevOps teams, each team deploys clusters and workloads using its own customized automation, handmade scripts, or open-source solutions,” said Madhura Maskasky, VP of Product at Platform9. “As a result, these clusters may fail to match the desired configurations for node size, autoscaling, networking, and RBAC rules, all of which are crucial for governance and security.”

Disjointed deployment/configuration of infrastructure and workload interrupts the overall workflow. The intermediate manual steps often lead to configuration errors. Applications that work in development may not work as expected in other stages of the CI/CD workflow.

DevOps teams may end up spending a lot of time troubleshooting issues leading to prolonged downtime and outages that can have significant business impact. Frequently, the issue is not with the app but with the configuration of the infrastructure on which the app is running.

These problems are amplified as companies scale clusters, teams, and locations.

“As Kubernetes deployments scale, enterprises are starting to deal with a chaotic environment of cluster and workload sprawl,” Ms. Maskasky explained.

Cloud native scale varies depending on a company’s use case:

• Geographic scale (e.g 1000s of edge locations)
• Hundreds of clusters in your data center or a single public cloud
• A handful of clusters with 100’s of nodes and divided up by namespace

Introducing Arlon: A unified solution to manage workloads and infrastructure

ClusterAPI, the Kubernetes project that lets you create, upgrade, and teardown Kubernetes clusters, is becoming increasingly popular and powerful with a lot of community effort and momentum behind it.

ArgoCD is becoming the de facto choice for continuous delivery and workload management using a declarative mechanism to maintain desired sets of configurations.

When you bring the best of these two pillars together to maintain, manage, and scale the full cloud-native stack – from infrastructure to workloads and everything in between, what you get is Arlon.

“Arlon provides scalable cluster and application lifecycle management built on top of industry-standard tools in the cloud native ecosystem,” said Bich Le, Chief Architect, Platform9. “By relying on the open, community-led pillars of ArgoCD, ClusterAPI, and GitOps methodology, this new project greatly simplifies the large-scale deployment, configuration, and operation of Kubernetes clusters and workloads.”

Arlon addresses the needs of developers, operations, and enterprise IT all in one unified solution. Currently, the solution is tested with AWS with roadmap plans to add other public clouds as well as bare metal.

“Project Arlon from Platform9 brings the best of GitOps and Cluster API to deliver consistent, repeatable, and scalable Kubernetes cluster provisioning experiences across the public cloud, enterprise data centers, and edge,” said Janakiram MSV, industry analyst. “While GitOps is traditionally used only for the continuous delivery of modern applications, Project Arlon exploits it to maintain the desired state of both the cluster infrastructure and the deployed workloads. It enables cluster administrators to enforce configuration, compliance, and security policies irrespective of the provisioning environment. This open source project has the potential to become the preferred choice of tool for cluster lifecycle management.”

Arlon is 100% open source with its own GitHub site, documentation, and community.