Rakuten Symphony picks a singular approach to Kubernetes

We met Robin.IO a few times in the past but always online due to the Pandemic and this time, during the 49th edition of The IT Press Tour, it was the right opportunity to meet the team face-to-face.

In the meantime, the company got acquired in April 2022 by Rakuten Symphony and Partha Seetala, the founder, originally CTO of Robin.IO and then CEO, became President of the Cloud Business Unit. The original Robin offering is now called Symworld Cloud. I invite you to check the recent podcast I recorded with Partha about Robin.IO, Rakuten Symphony and of course Kubernetes.

The positioning is clear and Partha said that at the beginning without any doubt that the mission is about the Distributed Stateful Edge Platform. It is perfectly aligned with the reality with Core - Edge - Cloud as these "wide" environments introduce some complexity in terms of IT operations, associated cost, performance, security and scalability. How do you solve that especially in the telecom world with 5G, the Rakuten Symphony playground, where things are extremely dispersed with edge model by nature.

Symworld Cloud builds and promotes 3 products: Symworld CNP, Symworld CNS and Symworld Orchestrator.

The first product, Symworld CNP, for Cloud-Native Platform, is a comprehensive Kubernetes platform that includes networking and storage services for intensive and critical workloads at the edge. CNP runs almost everywhere on Bare-Metal, VM on-premises or in the cloud. It offers an advanced scheduler for workload placement but also observability and motoring module. On the foundation, CNS is embedded in addition to a Kubernetes engine plus advanced networking modules.

The second product, Symworld CNS, for Cloud-Native Storage, is a dedicated storage stack for Kubernetes exposing persistent block an file volumes. It delivers advanced storage and data management capabilities for any Kubernetes distribution on any storage infrastructure. Data are protected with strictly consistent replication, HA with split-brain avoidance and functions like snapshot, backup, compression or encryption are also provided. This CNS edition belongs to the small group of the most comprehensive ones.

The third product, Symworld Orchestrator, is really a policy-based centralized automation engine to manage large scale Kubernetes environments from central to edge domains.

Clearly Rakutem Symphony picked the right Kubernetes ISV to push its mobile, 5G and Core-Edge-Cloud strategy.