Robin.io brings pay-as-you-go pricing to Red Hat private clouds

Robin.io, a leader in Kubernetes storage and data management, is bringing pay-as-you-go pricing to the Red Hat Marketplace for Robin Cloud Native Storage (CNS).

Dynamic pricing models are among the most alluring features of public cloud services but not commonly seen in private clouds. But that is changing as more vendors take advantage of new metering capabilities available in private cloud services like Red Hat OpenShift. Kubernetes storage solutions have traditionally been priced using an annual licensing model, especially for on-premises deployments.

The flexibility of paying for hourly consumption promises greater flexibility for businesses deploying ephemeral workloads, such as extract, transform, and load (ETL) processing; AI/ML workloads, such as data preprocessing, feature extraction, and model training; and ad-hoc data analysis on Red Hat OpenShift.

“This helps customers with flexible licensing terms that can reduce costs and encourage more experimentation,” Robin.io director of product Ankur Desai told VentureBeat in an email. His team had to develop a metering integration with Red Hat to make this work securely and privately to mitigate concerns about external monitoring.

Dynamic pricing on private clouds

The Red Hat Marketplace makes it easier for enterprises to provision cloud services for hybrid workloads that may span multiple private and public clouds. Robin CNS takes advantage of the “metering definition” as provided by the Red Hat Marketplace operator. There is no information sharing or network connection required with Robin because the Red Hat Marketplace operator collects consumption metrics for Robin CNS and passes the aggregated consumption metrics to the billing service.

Robin.io installs natively on any Kubernetes distribution within minutes and creates a block and file storage solution by pooling available storage resources such as HDDs, SSDs, and cloud disks. It also automates complex storage management and data management operations on Kubernetes and provides a simple API to developers. It is also application-aware, in that it understands the scope of a stateful application on Kubernetes and wraps all relevant components — including data, metadata, and config data — into a single entity. All data management operations, such as snapshots, backups, migration, are performed on the entire application, not just the data. This is important because many microservice applications are designed to be stateless in order to improve scalability and performance.

Dynamic pricing could play an important role in the growth of storage capabilities deployed alongside more dynamic applications common with microservice and container architectures.

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