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If you’re looking for hot trends in the IT sector, three immediately come to mind: Any type of software that handles the “CX” or “UX” (consumer or user experence); anything on the backend using containers and microservices; and workloads that run in the Amazon Web Services cloud.
Robin Systems, which makes cloud infrastructure software based on an open source foundation, checks the boxes for the second and third items listed. The San Jose, Calif.-based company on July 13 launched two new versions of its container-based developer platform that runs in AWS.
The new, freely available Community and Developer versions of the Robin Cloud Platform provide a container-based system for producing big-data workloads–such as those that run on Apache Hadoop, Spark and NoSQL databases–effectively and with automation at several points.
The 4-year-old company last year unveiled its RCP Enterprise version, claiming that it has the ability to run big-time workloads while reducing the performance overhead associated with conventional virtualization. Those two factors–high production volume alongside higher performance–don’t happen concurrently very often. But Robin’s container-based deployment model comprises some of the secret sauce that fuels this performance advantage.
All About Enabling DevOps Procedures
Robin Systems is all about enabling DevOps, which are software development processes that involve not only the code writers but also the engineers who deploy the software in the field and make sure it does what it’s supposed to do.
DevOps emphasizes cooperation between developers and IT operations. The goal is to change and improve the relationship between software developers and operations by advocating better communication and collaboration between the two business units.
Where once there were difficult professional walls to scale within an enterprise, DevOps is breaking them down and enabling teamwork-type environments.
The goal of agile environments is to get developers to move their applications from source code to production as quickly and painlessly as possible. This means breaking down silos and integrating core components for more simplified development using a contiguous pipeline approach.
Robin Systems is about more than enabling DevOps, however. This is because it can be used to manage and automate the entire application lifecycle for big-data pipeline components, including the applications themselves and their configurations, networking and storage.
Difference Between Versions is Number of Nodes They Power Up
The main difference between Robin’s Community and Developer Editions and the enterprise version is the number of nodes that can be run when using them. There’s no limit to the number of nodes that can be deployed with the enterprise edition.
The Developer Edition can be run on one node and is designed for tasks such as prototyping and testing. It provides developers with the ability to deploy their favorite products and also be able to snapshot and revert changes at will, thus enabling more freedom and experimentation.
The Community Edition can be run on a maximum of five nodes for DevOps teams (on either virtual or physical servers) with no limit on the nodes’ specifications. RCP CE helps teams running in the cloud who seek the agility and simplicity of running big-data pipelines in addition to distributed NoSQL databases, offering the ability to automate DevOps and DBA tasks. It helps DevOps teams go to market faster and take advantage of one-click self-service lifecycle management while keeping costs low, the company claimed.
Key Business Benefits
Robin RCP transforms infrastructure silos into a compute, storage and data continuum that enables:
- Applications to share servers without any loss of performance and predictability. Even the most critical enterprise applications–such as databases and big data clusters–can be consolidated without any performance compromise.
- Transparent application mobility across machines without any data loss. By decoupling compute from storage, RCP not only protects applications from server failures, it also ensures portability and mobility without moving or copying any data. RCP ensures seamless data access for applications no matter where they run.
- Fast and simple application deployment and lifecycle management. Using container agility, Robin Cloud Platform ensures admins that even the most complex distributed applications–including Hadoop such as Hortonworks, Cloudera and MapR, NoSQL databases such as Cassandra, MongoDB and CouchDB, and RDBMS such as Oracle, Postgres and MySQL–can be deployed within a matter of minutes. Quick application clones can be created within seconds, and application-level clone and snapshots allow applications to go back and forth in time for production as well as test and dev purposes.
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