The growing popularity of Kubernetes necessitates reliable, cloud-native backup and recovery for Kubernetes workloads across diverse architectures to protect data and applications. That was the topic of discussion during a Kasten by Veeam session at AWS re:Invent 2022, available on-demand here, featuring Senior Global Technologist Michael Cade and Member of Kasten’s Technical Staff Deepika Dixit. During the session, attendees learned about the simplicity of Kasten K10, the Helm chart and the solution’s scalability and multi-cluster dashboards.
Cade began with a discussion of separation of concerns in software delivery. While infrastructure teams are focused on building tools that provision, manage and secure the cloud computing infrastructure, application teams are usually focused on building applications that deliver business value to customers. However, according to Cade, over the past few years, these responsibilities have merged a bit, thanks to the trend toward shift-left development. “Developers have a bit more responsibility around data management,” he said.
With this increased responsibility come several challenges, and developers need enhanced data protection capabilities for Amazon EKS, including:
- Automation for workflows in Amazon EKS-native environments
- Cross-region integrated mobility to avoid fragmentation and enable deployment flexibility and disaster recovery
- Multi-layered, consistent data and application resource capture for Amazon EKS applications, Amazon EBS, Amazon EFS and S3 storage
- DevOps speed and scale with support for shift-left environments, secure self-service and IaC
“I come from a virtualization background,” Cade said. “About 15 years ago, there was a focus on protecting virtual machines with an agent, and that had a massive overhead. We created an agentless way to backup VMs by hooking into the vSphere API. Kasten K10 is very similar to that from a Kubernetes point of view.”
Cade added that Kasten K10 hooks into the Kubernetes API, so backup is fast and efficient. “We’re not an image-based backup at all, so we have the ability to provide reliable backups without the administrative overhead of managing agents,” he said.
Cade emphasized the importance of automation in the backup, recovery and restore process. “Anyone in the room who’s ever had an accidental deletion or some sort of failure scenario knows that Restore is critical, but you want to be able to automate that process,” he said. “Kasten K10 provides an automation layer for developers that are mindful of data protection, while still providing a UI for setting backup schedules.”
Kasten K10 on AWS
Available on the AWS marketplace, Kasten K10 enables seamless backup and disaster recovery on Amazon EKS, EKS Distro, and Kubernetes distributions such as Red Hat OpenShift on AWS (ROSA). A cohesive integration with AWS services enables developers to bring their own Kubernetes distributions, and it provides full application capture across regions, clusters and accounts.
To illustrate the value of Amazon EKS integrated data management, Cade provided an example of a Kasten K10 and Amazon EKS customer scenario. The customer was deploying Amazon EKS clusters in France and Italy using IaC methodologies and wanted to enable cross-cluster backup and DR across regions for stateful applications on MongoDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL and Amazon RDS. The applications were to be deployed on a mix of Amazon EBS and Amazon EFS backed storage, and ransomware protection was a key requirement.
According to Cade, legacy data management solutions are not a fit for cloud-native applications on Amazon EKS, and data management solutions must support application consistency as well as all of the backend storage types. “The customer needed to be able to protect workloads natively and gain a bit more visibility and granularity on the applications and everything inside of the Kuberenetes environment,” he said.
Kasten K10 can be deployed with AWS well-architected Amazon EKS clusters at IaC with Amazon EKS Blueprints. It provides deep Kuberentes integration with Amazon EKS and an application-centric approach to enable cross-region backup and DR. Kasten K10 also provides native application support with blueprints for MongoDB, PostgreSQL, mySQL and Amazon RDS, as well as native support for application snapshots and backup for Amazon EBS and EFS storage tiers.
“Kasten K10 addresses Day 2 data management challenges, such as backup and restore, disaster recovery and application mobility, to help developers run applications on Kubernetes with confidence,” Cade said.
Building Out the Demo
Following Cade’s presentation, Dixit provided an in-depth demo of workload migration and database integrations with Kasten K10, and some insight into cloud-native data protection using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), and Object Lock in Amazon S3. The demo also showcased Kasten K10’s application consistency features. The figure below illustrates how the team built out the demo:
Watch the full re:Invent session and demo here. Next, check out our free Kuberentes learning site, KubeCampus, or start your free trial of Kasten K10 today.
Tom Leyden is the VP of Marketing for Kasten by Veeam. As a marketing professional with networks in the USA, Europe and Israel, he has over the past 15 years built a track record with market-disrupting start-up companies in Cloud Computing, Storage, and Artificial Intelligence. His start-up successes include dedupe pioneer DCT (Symantec), early cloud innovator Q-layer (Sun/Oracle), Amplidata (HGST), and Elastic NVMe innovator Excelero. Belgium is home; the world is his workspace.
