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We ran a series on containerized stateful workloads to define what stateful workloads are, what are their benefits and what are the challenges users face when containerizing them.

[Read the whole series here: How Kubernetes Players Define Stateful Application; What exactly are the benefits of Stateful Applications; and Top Challenges Facing Stateful Workloads on Kubernetes]

In this article we will feature the solution from Robin Systems, a vendor who addresses these challenges with an industry first hyper-convergence approach for containerizing Stateful workloads.

According to the company, Robin software platform extends the Agility, Efficiency and Portability of Kubernetes to all Enterprise Applications, even complex Big Data, Databases, AI/ML and Custom Apps, on Any Infrastructure On-Premise, Hybrid Cloud or Multi-Cloud.

Robin serves a wide range of industries including Financial, Technology, Telco, Healthcare and Travel and Tourism. Its typical customers are enterprise users with hybrid and multi-cloud footprint adoption. “Robin solutions are aimed at customers adopting Linux and Linux-based application container and related technologies to modernize their infrastructure and data management to bring in agility,” said Radhesh Menon, CMO of Robin Systems.

“Robin’s customers are using, evaluating and deploying our technologies and at the same time typically are evaluating OpenShift or Pivotal for Stateless applications,” said Menon.

Kubernetes has become omnipresent. Everyone who is embarking on their digital transformation journey is using Kubernetes in some capacity.

Traditionally, Kubernetes was seen for stateless workloads, but as almost everything is embracing Kubernetes, there is a growing demand for stateful application on Kubernetes.

“The demand for including stateful applications on Kubernetes led to community innovation on capabilities such as StatefulSets and Persistent Volumes. The key driver/trend in this area is the ability to bring the agility of DevOps to the data infrastructure so that organizations can meet business needs faster while reducing costs and improving efficiency,” said Menon.

After talking to many users of Kubernetes it’s abundantly clear that there is a great deal of complexity that comes with it. It was not meant or supposed to be easy.

A recent survey conducted by CIO.com revealed that 68% of IT Managers flagging that significant improvements are needed to run stateful workloads on Kubernetes. Automated application deployment, performance isolation and managing environment/application data consistency across production, dev, and test were cited as the top 3 challenges when it comes to running Stateful applications according to the survey respondents.

Companies like Robin try to help customers by simplifying things. “We automate the deployment and management so that you can deliver an “as-a-Service” experience with 1-Click simplicity to the users,” said Menon.

With Robin, stateful workloads and data infrastructure can be modernized so that users can drive higher instant ROI driven by data mobility, better dev/test collaboration, agility due to decoupled compute and storage etc. Robin provides a seamless abstraction that hides hardware issues from the developers. No storage knowledge required, no network knowledge required, no Kubernetes knowledge required.

“Be it relational databases such as Oracle RAC, NoSQL databases such as MongoDB, Big Data Platforms such as Cloudera, or Search/Index solutions such as the Elastic Stack, ROBIN automates the deployment and management so that you can deliver an “as-a-Service” experience with 1-Click simplicity to the users,” said Menon.

He listed out some examples of how high-performance IT organizations are realizing the benefit of implementing ROBIN at scale to power business-critical data infrastructure with containers and Kubernetes.

● DevOps simplicity for Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana, Kafka at a Fortune 100 Financial powerhouse. 11 billion security events ingested and analyzed a day.
● Agility for Cloudera, Impala, Kafka, Druid as a Global Networking leader. 6 Petabytes under active management in a single Robin cluster.
● Self-service environment for Oracle, Oracle RAC as a Travel and Tourism leader. 400 Oracle RAC databases managed by a single Robin cluster.

Conclusion

Menon has a piece of advice for companies containerizing their stateful applications so they can embrace agility and cut costs. “The ideal is to ensure that the QoS requirements of the applications are met while they are containerized to leverage a shared infrastructure. ROBIN helps deliver an as-a-Service experience with 1-Click simplicity that accomplishes exactly that.”

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