Container-based cloud infrastructure provider Robin Systems Inc. is marking a new round of funding with a major new product release focused on the Kubernetes orchestration tool.

The company today announced what it says is the industry’s “first hyperconverged Kubernetes platform.” It enables companies to run big-data software such as Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark, an array of databases and also artificial intelligence and machine learning software inside Kubernetes, the company said.

The new product, which will coexist alongside the original Robin Cloud Platform, comes as the company closes on a $17 million round of Series B funding, led USAA Ventures with participation from previous investors Hasso Plattner Ventures, Clear Ventures, DN Capital and USAA.

Kubernetes has emerged as the de facto first choice for orchestrating software containers, which host applications that can run on any platform, and microservices, which are the components of containerized apps. But although Kubernetes is popular, not every enterprise has been able to implement it into their information technology infrastructure because of challenges such as the complexity of persistent storage, network and application lifecycle management.

The new ROBIN platform is meant to address these concerns by automating these functions, making it easier to run big data, databases and AI machine learning on Kubernetes-orchestrated infrastructure, the company explained.

“This new solution brings capabilities to Kubernetes, addressing the fundamental challenges in Kubernetes for big data and databases, improving ease-of-use and efficiency,” said Razi Sharir, Robin Systems’ vice president of products and marketing. “Running Kubernetes within the ROBIN platform allows users to enjoy the benefits of an application management layer that marshals all supporting components in an automated and optimized way, from compute (Kubernetes) through network to container-based block storage, the entire IO Path and app topology.”

The “hyperconverged” aspect of the ROBIN platform relates to its ability to deliver automated compute, storage and networking management capabilities to Kubernetes. Sharir explained that without hyperconvergence, Kubernetes can’t manage or view anything at the application level and cannot be used to manage the supporting storage and network needed for those apps to run.

One of the main benefits of Robin System’s hyperconverged Kubernetes is that it allows the company to provide what it calls a self-service app-store experience. That helps simplify app deployment and lifecycle management via one-click functions, while allowing apps to share resources and data with more predictable performance, the company said.

“The resulting self-service app-store experience enables a simplified, faster and easier way to deploy and manage complex distributed or clustered data-heavy apps, and use one-click operations to run complex lifecycle management operations,” Sharir explained.

Robin Systems said it’s planning to use the bulk of the new funds its secured to market the new platform.

Wikibon analyst James Kobielus said ROBIN was a noteworthy release because it’s one of the first underlying container/Kubernetes platforms available that allows for the easy integration and orchestration of data lake and data preparation tools such as Hadoop, Spark and TensorFlow.

“Considering that more of these platforms are being containerized down to their marrow, both on-premises and in the cloud, and given that DevOps workflows will become more intricate, it makes sense to build pipelines on Kubernetes,” Kobielus said.

The analyst said another positive is that ROBIN is agnostic to the underlying cloud-native infrastructure it runs on, which will support the decoupling of third-party compute and storage hardware.

“The fact that they boast one-click self-service and all to drive automated provisioning of hardware and software resources and the execution of DevOps workflow tasks is an important productivity feature in such an environment,” Kobielus said. “A full data science pipeline/workflow/app-management platform such as this hits a sweet spot in today’s AI/ML market.”

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