Robin.io Inks Partnership with Google Cloud to Transform Kubernetes Storage

If you’re a developer in 2019, you’re aware of containers and if you’re aware of containers, you’re likely either using or considering using Kubernetes, the container orchestration platform that has quickly and handily won the container orchestration wars.  Created by Google, Kubernetes is an open source tool that enables organizations to automate and manage various aspects of their container ecosystem.
I’m not going to get too deep into the weeds on what the technology is all about as there is plenty of information out there to help discover that piece.  Instead, I’ll talk about a key area of challenge in Kubernetes deployments: stateful storage.  This seems like such a simple thing to address.  We’ve been using stateful storage for decades.  Why is this so hard in the world of containers?
Part of the challenge is due to how containers work by design.  They’re inherently ephemeral, being created and destroyed regularly, which is the antithesis of how we’ve come to work with enterprise applications, where we’ve come to view stability as a key principle.  This is not to say that containers aren’t stable, but when you consider that the standard storage services that underpin them aren’t intended to survive the destruction of that container, it does beg the question, “how do I persist my data?”
To that end, container products and storage vendors have development a number of different techniques, each with some pitfalls.  In August of 2018, Robin.io introduced what has become a leap-forward solution with its Kubernetes layer, which allows stateful container storage both on-premises and in the public cloud using standard Kubernetes.
Again, articles abound around Robin.io’s August 2018 launch.

Robin.io + Google: A Better Together Partnership

Today, we’re at April 9, 2019 at Google Cloud Next where Robin.io announced a brand-new and significant partnership with Google that consists of two parts:

• Engineering to engineering collaboration to define state of art with data management with Kubernetes using Robin.io’s persistent storage layer
• Robin storage is now available in the Google Cloud Marketplace

This partnership brings Robin.io’s stateful storage solution to the forefront of Kubernetes deployments and enables key uses cases that would otherwise require additional hardware or software and would more than likely introduce complexity into what needs to be a simple equation.
I had in-depth discussions with Robin.io’s Chief Marketing Officer, Radesh Menon, and the company’s Co-founder and CTO, Partha Seetala.

This partnership is actually all the more impressive considering where Robin.io was just a few months ago.  Until August of 2018, Robin.io used a proprietary orchestration engine.  As the world swarmed toward Kubernetes, however, Robin.io pivoted away from their own product and went all-in on Kubernetes.  The result has been a transformational one for Robin.io, who is no longer battling for orchestration engine mindshare and is spending their time helping Kubernetes customers solve difficult stateful storage challenges and now has a newly minted partnership with one of the world’s leading cloud providers to help it continue to accelerate its growth.