Robin.io, a cloud-native Kubernetes storage and data management provider, launched a free-for-life edition of its namesake storage platform, aptly named Robin Express.

Ankur Desai, director of products for Robin.io, said the new Express edition supports up to five nodes and five terabytes of storage and does not limit access to all the capabilities of the core Robin platform.

The San Jose, California-based startup spun out its first product, a container orchestration platform for big data workloads, in 2013. It has since transitioned away from developing its own orchestration engine, and in 2018, launched Robin Cloud Native Storage (CNS), a hyperconverged Kubernetes infrastructure that aims to tackle Kubernetes’ peskiest problems: databases, networking, storage, and data management.

The platform is available in two formats: Robin Express and Robin Enterprise. Both come with all of the features of Robin CNS, and can run on-premises or on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure (Azure). In 2018, IBM announced general availability of IBM Db2 Warehouse on Robin Cloud Platform. Most recently, Robin Storage became available through Red Hat Marketplace to provide a one-stop-shop for users to purchase enterprise applications and deploy across any cloud or on-premises.

“Our focus is on making things easier for developers when it comes to managing flow conditions on Kubernetes,” Desai said. Robin.io tailored its platform to meet the growing container-based enterprise workload market that the IDC forecasts will grow at a 163% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2020 to 2023, and exceed $1.9 billion in value. IDC noted that more than one-quarter of those workloads would used as stateful containers.

The rise in containerized workloads brings with it the need to support expanding Kubernetes use cases that go beyond stateless applications to stateful applications. This also brings the need for day-to-day management of complex stateful applications that require capabilities and expertise most developers and DevOps teams lack.

Robin CNS absolves the need for storage expertise, Desai explained, and brings cloud-native data management capabilities to containerized applications running on-premises or in public cloud environments with automated lifecycle management for backup and recovery, snapshots, clone, and rollbacks.

The block storage platform natively integrates with Kubectl, Helm Charts and Operators and offers support for the likes of PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, MariaDB, Cassandra, and Elasticsearch.

Storage has been one of the challenges for expanding Kubernetes as containers have continuously missed the mark on persistent data. Each container acts as a physical server or virtual machine (VM) where all applications have a little piece of data. This eliminates the opportunity to manage a single storage volume.

Desai said Robin.io cracked the code on this challenge by treating the application and data as a single entity. For example, if a user snapshots a MongoDB application, Robin Storage captures the entire application topology and its configuration – this includes pod specifications, service, statefulset, secrets, and configuration maps – and all data volumes to create a point-in-time checkpoint.

Once a Helm deployment, operator department, or custom application is registered in Robin’s CNS platform, Robin wraps all of an applications context into one entity, tracking all components related to the applications from that point onward though a single command.

Robin.io snapshots entire complex, stateful workloads, instead of storage-level snapshots, Desai explained. This allows developers to build and deploy initial stateful applications on a Kubernetes cluster without the approval of a storage administrator.

The full arsenal of technology required to deliver on the promise of 5G hasn’t reached commercial networks – yet. Ultra-reliable, low-latency communications, network slicing, edge services, and converged access hinges on the adoption of cloud-native and containers by telecommunication providers. Kubernetes is being tasked with managing the container-based infrastructure that will be needed to support 5G networks and related services, automating what previously would have been manual labor-intensive operations.

Robin.io scored a deal in this direction last year when Japan's Rakuten Mobile tapped the vendor to build its NFV container-based infrastructure to support the carrier’s end-to-end cloud-native network.