5 Reasons to Run Databases on Robin and OpenShift
Simple one-click experience for Day 2 operations
Enterprises are rapidly moving to containers to develop and run their applications. Containers themselves may be simple technology, but as hundreds of applications are containerized into microservices across an enterprise, thousands of containers are being created and deployed. The resulting complexity demands a simpler way to manage a large number of containers, giving rise to the need for container orchestration and management platforms.
Kubernetes has emerged as the standard platform for container orchestration. Kubernetes (K8s) is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. Although extremely popular, Kubernetes has a steep learning curve and can prove challenging to manage at enterprise scale. This is where customers are turning to enterprise-ready Kubernetes platforms such as OpenShift. Red Hat OpenShift offers full-stack automated operations to manage hybrid cloud and multi-cloud deployments.
In a recent business value study, IDC discovered that OpenShift customers are experiencing 66% faster development cycles, 35% less involvement from IT staff, and 38% lower IT infrastructure costs. The average five-year ROI on OpenShift is a whopping 531%! And yet, we believe these benefits can improve further. The benefits and ROI mostly result from running stateless applications on OpenShift, with many stateful applications, such as databases, left to run on legacy infrastructure. What if you could run databases on OpenShift?
Owing to the early days of thought leadership around containers, many developers and architects still believe containers and Kubernetes are strictly for “stateless” applications, and “stateful” applications such as databases should continue running on old-school infrastructure. The “stateless vs. stateful” debate has raged on for years and muddied the water for containerization of data-intensive applications. But an “application” is never made up of just stateless components. Even a so-called stateless application depends on state which is either coming over the network or data that is stored in a persistent database and big data platforms.
The mindshare is slowly shifting though, with many architects exploring the possibility of running databases on Kubernetes and Openshift. In a recent market pulse survey conducted by Robin.io and CIO.com, 93% of the respondents believed Kubernetes to be a viable platform for stateful applications. The desire to standardize on a single platform also stems from the fact that creating infrastructure silos based on application types results in higher cost and inefficient use of resources.
Still wondering whether running databases on OpenShift is a good idea? OpenShift + Robin enables organizations to run stateful applications by addressing day 2 operations & data management requirements. Here’s what you can gain by bringing databases and other stateful applications to OpenShift.
1. Improve Developer Productivity with Self-Service Database Operations
By using OpenShift with Robin, you can automate the end-to-end database provisioning process and day 2 operations such as scaling, backups, snapshots, and clones. The operations are fully automated, take only a few clicks, and finish within a few minutes. Developers or DBAs who are simply interested in deploying and using databases do not need to be experts in Kubernetes or OpenShift. Robin.io provides a simple and intuitive experience for end-users to deploy, scale, and manage databases with just a few clicks. Developers also benefit from improved collaboration for dev/test refreshes of databases by cloning and sharing databases across teams. Getting a dev/test refresh of a database only takes a few minutes and is completely self-service.
2. Free DBAs and IT to Focus on Strategic Improvements
Without Robin and OpenShift, deploying a database may involve many steps taken by multiple departments including provisioning new servers, setting up network interfaces, setting up storage, DNS updates, installing grid, database etc. These tasks take a lot of time and effort in planning, coordination, and execution from multiple teams such as sysadmins, storage admins, network admins and DBAs. Using Robin + OpenShift, you can radically simplify the database provisioning and management effort by enabling single click operations that will abstract all the effort mentioned above. DBAs and IT teams can now focus on solving strategic problems for the business instead of being dragged down by mechanical tasks.
3. Respond to Customer Needs in Record Time
As a result of improved productivity across development and IT, you can achieve significant growth in the number of new applications, new features, and customer issues resolved per year. With Robin’s thin cloning technology, you can easily execute a dev/test refresh with a few clicks. Now your developers and QA can clone environments and collaborate faster to resolve customer issues. Your customers will notice the difference in your speed of response.
4. Consolidate Database Workloads to Improve Hardware Utilization
Underutilized hardware is a very common pain point for database deployment. Robin on OpenShift provides performance isolation with min/max IOPS control for guaranteed QoS, and role-based access controls (RBAC) to consolidate multiple database workloads without compromising SLAs. Now you can confidently consolidate your database deployments on a single OpenShift cluster, maximizing the hardware utilization.
5. Achieve Multi-cloud Portability
You can easily move applications and their data between on-prem and multiple clouds, and enjoy the cost-efficiencies of hybrid cloud by choosing the most economic infrastructure at any given point. You can avoid infrastructure lock-in with the flexibility to run your applications where you want.
To conclude, with the addition of Robin.io, you can maximize the agility and cost benefits 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 PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB and more on Robin and 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.