# Platform9 Edge Cloud Overview

Platform9 Edge Cloud is designed to be centrally managed and provides the ability to create and manage multi-tenant Kubernetes clusters across various geographical locations. Once installed, you will notice two distinct sets of components:

* The ***Management Plane*** (sometime referred to as Deployment Unit or DU)
* The ***Cluster Components***(Kubernetes and its associated components — mainly referred to as 'Host side components')

## The Management Plane (KDU)

A Deployment Unit (KDU) is a unit of deployment that typically represents a region for a given customer. You may also refer to this as the Platform9 Management Plane. The current version of the management plane has migrated away from the legacy DU which ran as a virtual machine on the deployment host and is now a containerized version of the same stack. The Management plane is the component that contains various functions like the following:

* Authentication services
* Cluster management services
* Host management services
* Security and tunneling services
* Data services, including message queues and databases
* Monitoring services like Grafana or Prometheus

A detailed architecture and is provided in the [architecture](https://platform9.com/docs//v5.3/PES/architecture-overview) section of the documentation.

## Cluster Components

Each management service controls one or more Kubernetes clusters, each cluster contains not only the Kubernetes services but also the services/components needed to help manage the Kubernetes cluster itself and other add-ons. These include:

* Kubernetes components like the api-server, scheduler, etcd, kubelet etc.
* CNIs: Calico, Flannel, SRIOV etc.
* Monitoring: Prometheus
* Supporting services to manage and upgrade the Kubernetes cluster.

See the [architecture](https://platform9.com/docs//v5.3/PES/architecture-overview) section for more details.


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