Increase developer productivity, reduce TCO, enhance agility.
The IT Press Tour had the opportunity to meet with Robin.io to learn how the cloud-native storage provider is accelerating deployment and automating lifecycle management of network and data services on Kubernetes (K8s).
This is projected to be a $30 billion market with cloud-native and 5G driving demand.
Stateful applications benefit from cloud-native storage. Data must be available even if pods, disks, or servers fail. DevOps teams should be able to manage stateful apps without becoming storage experts. Predictable app performance is critical in a shared cluster. Snapshots, clones, backup, and disaster recovery (DR) are required for business continuity. Observability is critical for maintainability and operations. Kubernetes addresses all these issues, but it's complicated and not easy to learn.
Robin cloud-native storage attempts to simplify the complexity by providing a solution that provides predictable and stable performance, elastic scale, observability to enhance maintainability, and data management to ensure business continuity. They do this with from-the-ground-up architecture, bare-metal performance, and application-aware storage and data management.
Cloud-native storage needs an application perspective. An application is more than just storage volumes. Ensuring data consistency for applications that use multiple storage volumes across multiple nodes is required but impossible without context. Data management for applications must be accessible for developers, and not require them to become storage experts.
Application-consistent snapshots help to recover from user errors, recover from failed upgrades, and store point-in-time version of the application. Robin snapshots capture an application's data, configuration, and metadata. The snapshots are application and crash-consistent, very fast based on RoW, and space-efficient by only capturing changes.
Application-consistent backups help recover from disk and server failures, meet DR requirements, as well as compliance requirements. By capturing the application's data, configuration, and metadata, the entire app can be restored in the same or different cluster. It's incremental and efficient by transferring only changed bytes. And, RBAC-enabled for added security.
Entire applications can be cloned from production to test/dev. Database reports can be run without affecting performance or production. Upgrades can be performed and patches validated before modifying production. Fully functioning clones of apps can be spun up. Thin clones mean cloning is fast and doesn't require massive data copies.
Multi-cluster, multi-cloud portability for applications enables Git-like workflows for apps for collaboration and migration.
The most popular use cases are data protection, DR, copy data management, multi-cloud portability, data management for Helm, and project/application archive.
The primary benefits are threefold: 1) developer productivity, 2) lower total cost of ownership, and, 3) infrastructure freedom and agility.