Multi-cloud Kubernetes Backup

With over 300 vendors exhibiting at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2022 (which is the long and official conference name), there was no shortage of early-stage vendors (230 at the silver and startup sponsor level) to visit for the 7000 attendees. Observability and security solutions were popular for the early-stage exhibitors. Even the big security and IT vendors have become regular and large sponsors, alongside the giant IT vendors and the hyper scalers, with their managed Kubernetes offerings, all vying in a lottery for the six diamond sponsor slots. KubeCon has clearly emerged as one of the most popular IT conferences to exhibit at and attend, which is an indication of the soaring popularity of Kubernetes. This is also supported by CNCF and other survey data that shows the rapid acceptance for deploying applications on managed Kubernetes offerings in public clouds. What we did not expect was the rapid adoption of multi-cloud strategies for Kubernetes.

The Multi-Cloud Journey for CloudCasa

For CloudCasa, let us start with a brief review of the KubeCon-driven journey to multi-cloud support, which started with gathering requirements at KubeCon San Diego 2019. The gap Catalogic saw, as a data protection vendor, was the lack of an easy to deploy and use backup solution; a lot of scripting was required which added to the complexity of deploying and managing Kubernetes. CloudCasa was launched as a beta service at the virtual-only KubeCon NA 2020, with the goal of providing a best-in-class, Kubernetes backup-as-a-service solution. Our goal was DevOps does not need to be storage or data protection experts to backup and restore applications on Kubernetes. As a SaaS solution, CloudCasa requires zero infrastructure to get up and running – no software or hardware to install, update, and managed for the backup solution. And as for IT Ops who usually manage backups, we did not want them to have to be Kubernetes and cloud experts and deal with the nuances of different Kubernetes distributions and managed services. CloudCasa normalizes all this by supporting all Kubernetes distributions and major cloud-based managed Kubernetes services.

At KubeCon NA 2021 last fall in LA, persistent volume backups to cloud storage became generally available for CloudCasa with utility pricing and EKS auto-discovery for AWS accounts. Leading up to the next KubeCon, we extended the AWS account integration from providing just cluster auto-discovery and guidance on what to backup, to automating the data recovery and migration process for Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) clusters and their persistent data.

This enables automation for cross-cluster, cross-account, and cross- region data recovery for EKS, supporting a “shift left” to provide cluster and data migration for dev, test, and staging, along with supporting compliance and disaster recovery for IT Ops. Further, cloud integration as depicted below, provides security, resiliency, and automation opportunities to help enable the multi-cloud Kubernetes journey.