The Robin Platform
The Robin Platform is a comprehensive, Kubernetes-based solution designed to automate and simplify the deployment, scaling, and lifecycle management of data and network-intensive applications. Here’s a detailed overview of what the product does and its key features:
Overview
Robin Platform leverages pure open-source Kubernetes, providing a “batteries included, but replaceable” packaging mode. This allows users to either use the built-in open-source Kubernetes or replace it with their own CNCF-certified Kubernetes distribution, including on-premises or cloud-vendor distributions.
Key Features and Functionality
Cluster Operations, Monitoring, and Observability
- Fully automated installation on-premises (bare metal, VMs) and in the cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP, IBM).
- Unified management of containers and VMs using a single interface.
- Built-in monitoring and metrics collection for hardware components, pods, and applications.
- Holistic observability for compute, network, and storage using Robin’s Sherlock tooling.
Advanced Scheduling and Placement Policies
- Support for multi-service affinity, anti-affinity, data locality, and infrastructure-aware placement policies.
- NUMA-aware scheduling policies for complex data and network applications.
- Application-aware QoS policies and advanced node, rack, lab, and datacenter placement policies.
Capabilities for Data-Intensive Applications
- An application and infrastructure-aware storage and data management stack, simplifying storage and data management.
- High-performance capabilities that consistently outperform bare metal and competitors across various workloads.
- Highly scalable, managing multiple petabytes in production deployments.
- Built-in data resiliency through synchronous replication and automatic re-sync on failures.
- Application-centric snapshots and backups, along with built-in encryption and compression.
- Rapid failover of storage volumes to restore data access even under network partitions.
- Support for a wide range of databases and big data stores, including MongoDB, Cassandra, Postgres, MySQL, Oracle, SAP HANA, and more.
Capabilities for Network-Intensive Applications
- Persistent IP addresses on pod failover, useful for deploying complex network functions.
- Support for multiple CNI plugins simultaneously (Calico, OVS, SR-IOV, etc.).
- Multiple NICs per pod with advanced VLAN support.
- Advanced SR-IOV support for both CNFs and VNFs.
- Simplified connectivity between Kubernetes and external applications without NAT or LB.
- Support for deploying and managing RAN (Radio Access Network) components.
Application Deployment and Lifecycle Management
- Built-in support for snapshotting, cloning, backing up, or migrating any Helm or Operator-based application.
- Simplified deployment and management of complex applications using the Robin SuperOperator.
- 1-click cloning of entire applications (data configuration metadata) from production to test/dev environments.
- 1-click or policy-based automatic resource scaling (vertical) and service scaling (horizontal).
- 1-click application stop, restart, relocate, snapshot, time travel, backup, and restore.
- 1-click application portability across multiple clusters or clouds.
- 1-click application upgrades with DAG-based automation and validation before upgrading production applications.
User Management and Access Control
- Robust user management system with Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) for fine-grained control over user operations and resource access.
- Users can be organized into discrete groups (tenants) based on function or business requirements.
- Each user can have different roles for each tenant they are a member of, determining their capabilities and access to objects.
- Custom user capabilities can be defined and managed to tailor permissions to specific needs.
In summary, the Robin Platform is a powerful tool for managing complex data and network-intensive applications on Kubernetes, offering advanced features in scheduling, storage, networking, and user management, all designed to enhance efficiency, scalability, and simplicity in application deployment and lifecycle management.