At a recent trade show, I unveiled how to supercharge edge compute environments with Rakuten Cloud-Native Storage, a software-defined storage solution built for Kubernetes-based deployments that is a pre-integrated option for the Google Distributed Cloud Edge on-premises edge solution.
Imagine Joe, an IT admin, whose edge Kubernetes environment is running smoothly with a few web servers and an authentication system. He's confident in his setup. What Joe doesn't know is that his CTO is about to deploy complex stateful applications. Think retail billing, demand generation, or e-commerce. This is where the smooth sailing ends. While Kubernetes provides basic storage volume primitives, it was never engineered for the robust, persistent, software-defined storage required by these new applications. Its evolution focused on stateless, web-scale workloads, leaving a critical void that Rakuten Cloud-Native Storage is designed to fill.
In a traditional virtual machine (VM) deployment, an application’s configuration on Day 0 or Day 1 could easily be matched with Day 100 data from a backup, because nothing fundamental changed about the VM.
Kubernetes works differently. It’s designed to move workloads between pods and nodes dynamically, scale them up or down, and update configurations on the fly. Over time, secrets, metadata, and application states change. If something fails and you try to restore Day 100 data with a Day 1 configuration, you are in for a complex, manual experience.
This problem is magnified at the edge. Fixing it could mean sending someone on-site to manually reconfigure the application, a costly and time-consuming process.
Rakuten Cloud-Native Storage solves this with application-aware storage. Instead of just backing up raw data, it also automatically captures the entire application construct: Kubernetes configuration, application metadata, and secrets. This means that, for every backup, snapshot, or clone, Day 100 data is matched with the Day 100 configuration for that application. When a restore is needed, everything comes back exactly as it was, either automatically or at the click of a mouse.
Edge deployments rarely have the luxury of large, dedicated storage arrays. They often start with minimal storage nodes or hyperconverged systems, where compute and storage are on the same platform. Hardware can vary depending on budget and availability–some nodes might use NVMe, others might use SSDs or HDDs.
Rakuten Cloud-Native Storage automatically discovers nodes and their storage media and applies write policies to create a shared storage pool(s). This not only supports backup and recovery but also enables worry per-group and per-application replication.
If a node fails, workloads can switch to another replica without interruption. When the failed node comes back, whether after a simple power outage or a repair, it rejoins the group and resumes replication. Service continues without downtime.
When choosing a software-defined storage layer, whether directly from Rakuten Cloud or through Google Distributed Cloud Edge, keep in mind:
• Managing data persistence and availability.
• The different kinds of storage media and node types are used.
• How easily nodes can be added.
• What level of control exists over backups, cloning, replication, and failover.
Rakuten Cloud-Native Storage addresses all of these requirements in a single integrated platform.
One of the things that makes Rakuten Cloud-Native Storage unique is its integration with the Google Distributed Cloud Edge on-premises solution. Rakuten Cloud-Native Storage is the only pre-integrated, pre-certified storage partner for this platform.
This level of integration is the result of an 18-month co-development effort, which met Google’s strict security standards and completed joint testing and validation for every release.
The integration extends beyond technical compatibility. Rakuten Cloud-Native Storage is tied into Google’s marketplace, billing, and support systems. That means customers don’t have to manage multiple vendor relationships. If there’s an issue, they simply call Google, and the support teams work together to resolve it.
Rakuten Cloud-Native Storage is already running in demanding real-world environments. It’s part of a global retail deployment, where high availability and low-latency access are critical. These deployments show how intelligent, software-defined, application-aware storage at the edge can support large-scale, revenue-generating workloads.
By pairing Kubernetes with Rakuten Cloud-Native Storage, organizations can confidently run stateful workloads at the edge. The software-defined storage platform ensures data persistence, simplifies recovery, and delivers continuous availability, even in constrained, remote, or mixed-hardware environments. For engineers designing edge systems, it offers the storage intelligence that Kubernetes alone doesn’t provide, keeping applications consistent, resilient, and ready for whatever comes next.
To hear my whole presentation, watch the video here: https://youtu.be/FaNTbAoAuSs?si=dfH-mR73SLNkeDoz.
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