Kubernetes Showcased at VeeamON 2021

This week we wrapped up the last fully virtual VeeamON event (hopefully) and announced that next year’s event will be heading to Las Vegas. I think it is very likely the event will become a hybrid one, to enable the growing demand in this space and to view the news and product updates.

For Kasten by Veeam, this was the first VeeamON event under the Veeam banner and not as a strategic partnership. There was a sense of wanting to learn about Kubernetes and data management from the audience, and we saw that with the engagement and audience numbers in our dedicated sessions, for the Platform Operators that will be managing the Kubernetes cluster in the not too distant future. 

The VeeamON 2021 platform is still very much active and all sessions can be accessed on demand here.

Here are the sessions that highlighted Kubernetes best practices:

Kubernetes Backup Best Practices Meets Pac-Man 

Our sessions kicked off with some interactive fun, and when you watch we hope you can see how well this would have gone down in a live session, with the audience participating in playing a little pac-man to get their high scores on the leaderboard to win a prize, which could have been some of those smart looking custom sneakers! Pac-Man allowed us to simulate that mission critical application in your Kubernetes cluster with a NodeJS front end and a MongoDB to hold those high scores, because obviously those high scores are super important. A big shout out to Dean Lewis from VMware for co-presenting with me.

Kasten K10 by Veeam: Kubernetes Backup and DR

This session was a fully focused demo session exploring the capabilities and functionality of Kasten K10, a walkthrough demo that shows you the simplicity of the product and the ease in which you can protect your data but also the flexibility that you have around restoring not only back to the original location but also transforming that restore into different Kubernetes clusters. Great work from Tom Manville, Kasten’s Director of Engineering, on this session.

Peeling the Onion: K8s on VMware

Over the past few years VMware have made some huge strategic bets on Kubernetes with their vSphere Tanzu project. A lot of the audience that attends VeeamON will be running their current virtual machines on vSphere and for some this is a logical step into the Kubernetes platform by leveraging an ecosystem they are already familiar with, this session is a beginner-friendly session that covers what has caused the rise in popularity and why containers are an essential part to any modern stack. You will also hear Vaibhav Kamra, CTO of Kasten, talk about why you should be considering Kubernetes and what options you have when it comes to VMware. 

Cloud to Cloud-Native Evolution: Backup Best Practices

Finally on the session front it was back to me and David Hill, Global Technologist, Project Strategy at Veeam, to talk about the recent surge of adoption into the cloud and cloud-native space for your workloads. This talk touched on how technology has changed quite a bit since we went from physical to virtual, and now we have lots more choice and flexibility on where we store our data and how we present that data to our applications. Data Management challenges stay the same, but data still needs protecting from accidental deletion or malicious activity. This session goal was to break down some of those daunting thoughts about cloud and cloud-native being so different to on-premises environments. We wanted to focus on protecting the right workloads with the right tools while highlighting some of the available platforms and services for your needs.

The Finale 

Even before Veeam’s acquisition of Kasten took place, there were product integration discussions, and on the final day of VeeamON we were excited to share with the audience the first part of the integration between Kasten K10 and Veeam Backup & Replication. A very short cameo demo can be found in the General Session: Next-Generation IT​ where I showed the ability of sending your Kubernetes backups to Veeam Backup & Replication as well as a failure scenario to perform the recovery from the same repository back into production. More on this to come later. Also in this general session, Niraj Tolia, Kasten GM, during an informative panel presented how the role of the data center administrator is evolving and how containers will shape the next wave of infrastructure and data protection. 

We hope you watch the content in the above links, and please ask us questions. You can always find us on social media. 

Next up, we are planning some deep technical sessions for Cloud Field Day 11; so watch this space for another article about what we intend to cover on the Kasten K10 platform.