Robin.io Adds Support for IBM Kubernetes Service
Robin.io, a provider of data management and storage software, designed to be deployed as containers, deepened its ties with IBM this week by announcing support for IBM Kubernetes Service (IKS).
That move comes on the heels of announcing support for IBM Cloud Satellite, a managed service through which IBM manages edge computing platforms, based on Kubernetes, on behalf of customers.
Ankur Desai, director of product for Robin.io, says while containerized applications have been around for some time, it’s only now that a larger number of organizations are starting to deploy stateful applications on top of Kubernetes clusters. Previously, a stateless container application would eventually store data on an external storage system.
Now, organizations are trying to both improve performance of stateful applications by accessing data local to a cluster while simultaneously reducing the total cost of IT by unifying the management of compute, data and storage, Desai notes.
The Robin Cloud Native Storage platform provides access to block storage on bare-metal platforms that it is integrated natively with Kubectl, Helm Charts and Operators. It provides support for high availability, snapshots, backups and thin clones and can be deployed on multiple clouds.
The transition to Kubernetes creates an opportunity to reunify data and storage management, which, Desai notes, have been managed in isolation from one another for decades. As storage becomes software-defined, it becomes possible to, for example, manage data protection from the same console used to access policies for storage systems based on commodity processors, Desai adds.
In fact, software-defined storage systems will increasingly become integrated with continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platforms, as the management of applications and data operations (DataOps) become more unified, Desai says. Rather than having a variety of specialists on staff, the future of IT is starting to look more like a team sport that will revolve around specific application deployments, Desai says.
Less clear is exactly is who will be on those teams. IBM, along with other cloud services and on-premises platform providers, are making a case for managing IT infrastructure on behalf of customers wherever it resides. The argument is that taking that approach will enable IT organizations to allocate more of their limited resources to application development at a time when Kubernetes expertise is difficult to find and retain.
Regardless of how IT is managed, the silos within IT teams are breaking down. There may still be members of an IT team that know more about one area than another, but the days when an IT professional focuses on one domain to the exclusion of all others is now all but over. Each advance in automation makes it more feasible to manage multiple platforms at higher levels of abstraction. In fact, it won’t be too long before IT teams are routinely managing IT infrastructure residing in multiple clouds, alongside servers and storage systems residing in on-premises IT environments, as hybrid cloud computing continues to mature.
In the meantime, IT professionals, in addition to becoming better acquainted with Kubernetes, might want to start studying up on a range of platforms; to varying degrees, they may need to know how to manage those either on their own or alongside a managed service provider (MSP).
