Container-based cloud infrastructure provider Robin Systems Inc. today added support for a variety of popular enterprise databases and applications to its platform.

In addition, the company said its platform can now be deployed on Microsoft Corp.’s Azure cloud, in addition to Amazon Web Services and on-premises hardware.

The Robin Cloud Platform is a kind of infrastructure layer that enables big-data workloads such as Apache Hadoop, Spark and nonrelational databases to be run within software containers instead of in traditional virtualization infrastructure. Containerizing workloads in this manner abstracts them away from the underlying hardware, which means they can be run on any kind of infrastructure without changing the underlying code. The Robin Cloud Platform automates their deployment in containers by letting the applications autoconfigure storage, compute and networking across on-premises and cloud-based environments.

Robin Systems said container workloads provide better performance, because traditional hypervisors for running virtual machines are deployed on bare metal servers that generally consume more processing power. The resulting performance decrease can hinder an analytics cluster a great deal, especially if it’s handling fast-moving information that has to be analyzed and presented to users while it’s still fresh.

With that in mind, Robin Systems said, the Robin Cloud Platform 4.0 release gives its customers the opportunity to containerize additional databases, including SAP HANA, IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server and packaged enterprise applications. This is a significant development because these kinds of databases cannot be easily deployed inside containers because of their complex services and tight interdependencies, which are incompatible with the classic Docker microservice philosophy, the company said.

The expanded support means that Robin Cloud Platform now offers “the broadest support of enterprise data apps in the market,” the company claims. Moreover, these apps can now be accessed via a kind of “app store” interface, from which they can be deployed and managed more easily.

“Our customers tell us that what excites them most about Robin is the App-store experience that lets them easily deploy, manage and consolidate all big data, NoSQL and databases,” said Premal Buch, chief executive officer of Robin Systems.

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