Platform9 opened the doors on a trio of Kubernetes Managed Apps which it says will help customers answer the “now what?” question that inevitably comes once they get Kubernetes up and look for something to do with it.

In a blog post announcing the apps, Platform9’s senior product manager PMK [K8s] and managed apps, Eric Bannon said, “Kubernetes alone is already notoriously difficult to operate at scale.” Which is why Platform9 offers its as a managed services.

Once they wanted to actually run some applications, he claimed, “Teams have to learn every new integrated app from scratch (API’s, configuration using complex YAML and Helm charts, HA processes, persistent storage, backup plans, and more).”

So, the SaaS provider has packaged up three key applications as fully managed services: Prometheus; EFK; and MySQL. It has also promised 99.9 per cent uptime for each. Further, similarly bundled, applications will come in future releases to its Managed Apps Catalog. The apps can be deployed and administered via a UI or with the native Kubectl CLI interface.

Bannon said, its Managed Apps offering would provide “these core services as built-in capabilities, provided out of the box for each deployed managed application. This way, self-service users do not need to worry about installing and configuring these dependencies while deploying their specific app instance.”

He also claimed that monitoring and logging of each of the apps “is enhanced to incorporate system-level metrics around resource utilization of the app, with no involvement or configuration required from end users.”

Where appropriate, he continued, Platform9 would partner with other companies offering specific apps or Kubernetes operators – indeed, it has partnered with Percona on its MySQL offering.