Kubernetes is without a doubt the de facto platform for running both stateless and stateful applications in the cloud. Enterprises are becoming increasingly reliant on its ecosystem for business operations — cloud, development and IT operations teams must keep up with the rate of innovation happening on the platform.
Kubernetes adoption continues to grow rapidly. A recent report by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) found that more than 90% of organizations surveyed were using Kubernetes in 2020 — an increase of 33% over the previous two years. As the number of edge nodes performing data acquisition and processing for a variety of applications continues to scale, the number of Kubernetes edge clusters and containers increases commensurately. As such, Kubernetes is becoming the linchpin in the edge architecture.
However, with the excitement of growth also come the challenges of providing a streamlined and effective Kubernetes deployment. Current Kubernetes monitoring, management and deployment tools often require extensive time and setup expertise and lack process automation when first deployed. Developers/DevOps and Kubernetes admins want an automated and simplified end-to-end experience to manage, monitor and troubleshoot Kubernetes environments. They also want to use the best management tools available rather than being forced to use siloed solutions. Effective tool deployment is a technology imperative for use of Kubernetes at scale.
Enter Kasten by Veeam’s most recent release of the Kasten K10 platform -- V4.5 -- which provides significant advancements:
- Improved out-of-the-box capabilities with enhanced workflow extensibility
- Extending Kubernetes application backup and mobility to the edge
- Ecosystem innovations including Veeam Backup & Replication integration
Delivering a Better Out-of-the-Box Experience
Kasten understands that Kubernetes deployment teams want to both quickly activate their environment and gain insight into system parameters and health.
New Metrics, Dashboards and Tools
Kasten K10 V4.5 includes cloud native tools to effectively manage, monitor and troubleshoot data protection risk and management functions in Kubernetes environments, out-of-the-box, minimizing time to market for new deployments. These new observability and visualization tools enable DevOps teams to:
- Gain insight into Kasten K10 operations (alerts and metrics can be set up and received in a variety of delivery formats such as email, slack, etc.)
- Confirm overall health of the system
- Forecast storage need (including dedup and compression ratios)
- Analyze the number of policies running in the environment
- Confirm success and failure rates of backup operations performed
Native Amazon RDS and K8ssandra Support
Kasten K10 V4.5 also provides automated environment discovery and seamless integration with Kasten K10 backup policies for Amazon RDS, a distributed relational database service by Amazon Web Services, and K8ssandra, a Kubernetes distribution of Apache Cassandra, an open-source NoSQL distributed database. Kasten K10 can automatically discover the applications and identify the underlying databases. As a result, enterprises can now enjoy Kasten K10’s secure application backup and mobility for seamless production of cloud native workloads, with application protection and cluster portability.
Enhancing Extensibility
Just as customers demand new tools to make their deployments easier and faster to manage, they also want the flexibility to select both the best tools available to them in the wider ecosystem, and tools they have experience with and use daily. Kasten K10 V4.5 provides integrations with a variety of external data services, delivering simplified blueprints that can be consumed easily, as well as documented how-to guides for ease of operation across data service environments.
Kasten also understands that Kubernetes admins want to employ a single pane of glass for their favorite monitoring and alerting tools of choice (e.g., DataDog or Prometheus/Grafana), to streamline operations. Kasten K10 V4.5 supports integration for the best and favorite tools available in the Kubernetes ecosystem, to enable best-of-breed cloud operations.
New Kubernetes Edge Support
Kubernetes is growing, with more use cases driving its expansion including deployments across clouds and data centers and now extending to the edge.
Edge traffic growth continues to be driven by applications and technologies such as video streaming, gaming, 5G and high-volume store-based retail applications. Edge computing brings computation and data storage closer to data sources by leveraging smaller, lightweight, and distributed data centers, rather than large, traditional ones. The goal is to improve response times and save bandwidth, enabling edge applications to run with far less latency and greater autonomy. Containers, which are lightweight and require low management overhead, are a great way to deploy edge node applications. As such, Kubernetes is the optimal orchestration tool for containers.
Secure and Reliable Backup for Edge Applications, Along with Application Mobility
Support K3s and Launch Partners for Amazon EKS Anywhere
K3s is a highly available Kubernetes distribution designed for production workloads in unattended, resource-constrained, remote locations. It is packaged as a single <40MB binary that reduces steps needed to install, run and auto-update. Amazon EKS Anywhere is a fast-growing Kubernetes deployment on-premises and in the cloud.
K3s and EKS Anywhere provide many edge-specific features. Kasten K10 delivers a single-pane-of-glass solution for data management of all edge applications. Kasten has tested K3s and EKS Anywhere extensively and included these distributions in our automation and build pipelines. Kasten K10 supports data backup and recovery no matter where it is needed, protecting it with our same end-to-end technology capabilities and support model. Enterprises gain confidence that their innovative edge applications are safe from data loss, corruption, or malicious attacks, and can innovate rapidly to keep pace with this exciting new area of software development.
Ecosystem Innovations
Kasten is constantly expanding its Kasten K10 ecosystem to enable integrations with industry-leading technologies and platforms. We partner with leaders across cloud, Kubernetes distributions, databases and storage vendors to streamline and simplify the development workflow and provide robust backup and data recovery capabilities across diverse Kubernetes development environments.
While the threat of ransomware continues to increase, the importance of having an immutable copy of your data has never been greater. Version 4.0 launched as the industry's first ransomware Kubernetes data protection platform with support for object-lock-enabled AWS S3 Storage. Kasten K10 V4.5 continues this innovation by extending customer choice and flexibility through ecosystem partnerships providing additional validated immutable object storage recovery locations. K10 V4.5 brings validated S3 object lock immutable storage support from Cloudian, Wasabi, MinIO and Backblaze.
For Kubernetes clusters running on VMware vSphere, Kasten K10 V4.5 extends the value of customer’s existing Veeam investments with support for shared Veeam Backup and Replication (VBR v11a) storage repositories. This new innovation brings new backup target support for additional storage types, such as Cisco S3260 and HPE Apollo servers, ReFS- and XFS-formatted block storage, deduplication appliances and SMB targets.
The latest release also makes it easier for customers to access and purchase Kasten K10 supported solutions through a wider range of partner organizations and their marketplaces.
To learn more about Kasten K10 V4.5 and see it in action, visit us at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2021 North America in person or virtually.
Kasten K10 V4.5 resources can be found here:
Gaurav Rishi is the VP of Product and Partnerships at Kasten by Veeam. He is at the forefront of several Kubernetes ecosystem partnerships and has been a frequent speaker and author on cloud-native innovations. He previously led Strategy and Product Management for Cisco's Cloud Media Processing business. In addition to launching multiple products and growing them to >$100M in revenues, he was also instrumental in several M&A transactions. Gaurav is a computer science graduate and has an MBA from the Wharton School.
