Deploy and Manage PostgreSQL on OpenShift with just a few clicks

Robin enables “as-a-service” experience for PostgreSQL on OpenShift

PostgreSQL is one of the most popular operational databases that powers critical business applications across the enterprise. OpenShift is the leading Enterprise container management platform. Quite naturally, there is great interest in simplifying PostgreSQL operations on OpenShift to achieve productivity gains and cost savings.

There are a few “Operators” available that can enable running PostgreSQL on OpenShift today. However, managing multitudes of database deployments on a day-to-day basis using these operators can become very difficult.

Deploying and managing databases on OpenShift using Operators requires expert level understanding of Kubernetes. Platform engineers may be able to deploy databases using Operators, but it is not their day-to-day job to operate databases. On the other hand, DBAs and application developers who have to operate databases on a daily basis find themselves increasingly dependent on platform engineering teams for routine tasks.

This is where Robin.io comes in. The Robin operator provides an easy and intuitive solution to the end-users to operate databases on OpenShift.

Robin makes it easy to deploy, manage, and scale PostgreSQL deployments on OpenShift. With Robin, you can create scalable PostgreSQL deployments in minutes and manage day-2 operations with a few simple clicks. Robin automates complex and time-consuming administrative tasks such as provisioning, storage allocation and management, replication for high availability, and backups for disaster recovery.

Using Robin, Platform/Cloud engineering teams can deliver Database-as-service (DBaaS), similar to Amazon RDS, on OpenShift. They can now enable application developers and DBAs to deploy and manage databases such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, Elastic etc in a completely self-service mode.

The PostgreSQL-as-a-service solution gives application developers and DBAs access to the familiar capabilities of the PostgreSQL database engine. This means that the applications and BI tools they already use today with the existing databases can be used with PostgreSQL on OpenShift. Following key capabilities of the solution help improve developer/DBA productivity and reduce hardware and administrative costs:

Easy, self-service deployment

The DBaaS solution provides self-service provisioning and management capabilities to developers, DBAs, and BI teams. It automates the end-to-end database provisioning process for PostgreSQL. The entire provisioning process takes a few clicks and finishes within a few minutes. The end-users can easily customize their deployments according to their compute and storage requirements.

High availability out-of-the-box

This solution provides automatic failover for the PostgreSQL database in the event of a node failure. It also provides data replication to mitigate disk failure, with placement policies for the replicas to ensure that the replicas don’t end up on the same disk or the same host.

Effortless scaling

Now, you can scale the CPU, memory, and storage resources using a few simple clicks, or a single API call. Compute scaling (CPU and memory) operations typically complete in a few seconds. As your storage requirements grow, you can provision additional storage on-the-fly with zero downtime.

Fast, predictable performance

The DBaaS solution leverages a purpose-built software defined storage that provides bare metal performance. Also, for low latency applications, developers can simply turn on data locality with one click, forcing the PostgreSQL server pods and their respective persistent volumes to run on the same physical host.

Copy data management (Clones and Backups)

It is inevitable that each PostgreSQL database deployment will end up having multiple copies across dev, test, and prod environments. The DBaaS solution enables developers to create clones of their environments in a complete self-service mode, without having to create IT tickets, resulting in significant productivity gains. Robin utilizes the thin cloning technology to minimize the impact of each clone on storage, resulting in significant cost savings. In addition, Robin copy-on-write snapshots to recover from user errors, and full backups to remote locations for disaster recovery.

Multi-tenancy and Performance Isolation

You can create a strict separation of concerns across teams, users, and applications using authentication, RBAC, and encryption. It allows for flexible policies (for example, how many resources each team is allowed to consume) to simultaneously manage several deployments while providing both logical and physical isolation. Also, you can enforce upper limits on IOPs consumption by any database, eliminating the noisy neighbor issue and guaranteeing QoS.

To conclude, with the addition of Robin, Platform Engineering teams can create database-as-a-service on OpenShift to deliver a self-service solution to application developers and DBAs. Enabling DBAs and application developers to perform database management in a self-service mode reduces their dependence on the platform engineering teams for routine tasks, making it practical to run databases on OpenShift. Robin helps you maximize the value of OpenShift by bringing databases to the same platform you trust to run your stateless applications. If you want to learn more, stay tuned for our blog series that explains how to deploy, scale, and manage databases such as MySQL, MongoDB, Cassandra and more on OpenShift.

Time for a demo? Give us 20 minutes to show you how Robin on OpenShift can accelerate deployment and lifecycle management of your database applications.