As the season shifts, we at CloudCasa are excited to share a fresh batch of updates with you. This autumn, we’re rolling out new features designed to bring more power and flexibility to your data protection strategy. From the convenience of our new Self-Hosted option to the seamless integration with Velero, our latest offerings are tailored to support enterprises in strengthening their data resilience.
Self-hosted Option
The star of this release is our new CloudCasa Self-hosted option. Tailored for enterprise customers who prefer an on-premises or private cloud solution, this offering brings the best of CloudCasa directly to your doorstep. Enjoy nearly all the familiar features, with the exception of CloudCasa storage and initial cloud integration (but don’t worry, they’re on their way!).
Enterprise SSO Option
Enhancing access and security, we’ve now fully integrated with popular enterprise identity and access management systems. This means you can seamlessly log into CloudCasa using your organization’s single sign-on credentials. Convenience and security rolled into one – and it’s just an extra option away.
Full ARM64 Support
Embracing the latest in technology, CloudCasa now boasts full ARM64 architecture support for our agent. This update extends across all CloudCasa Pro features and is compatible with clusters on AWS Graviton, Azure Ampere Altra, and GCP Tau T2A instances. Installing the agent on ARM processor-based nodes is as straightforward as ever, requiring no special procedures.
Support for Backup & Restore of External Load Balancers for EKS
In our continuous effort to enhance CloudCasa’s capabilities, we’ve now introduced support for backing up and restoring external load balancers associated with EKS clusters. The process is straightforward: backups happen automatically once CloudCasa is linked to your AWS account.
For restores, we’ve added a new step in the Restore cluster wizard, ensuring that all necessary components of the load balancer, like health checks and forwarding rules, are restored seamlessly. This support extends to AWS ALBs, NLBs, and classic load balancers, with plans to introduce similar functionalities for AKS and GKE in future updates.
New Advanced Parameters for Restores
To give you more control and efficiency in restoration, we’ve added three advanced parameters in restore definitions. These parameters allow adjustments in the parallelism of restore jobs, striking the right balance between speed and resource usage.
You can now modify the concurrency settings to determine the number of PVs and files per PV restored simultaneously. By default, we set it to 2 PVs and 8 files per PV, but feel free to adjust these for quicker restores.
Additionally, the Data mover memory limit setting is now customizable, ranging from 512MB to a robust 8GB, to accommodate your specific needs during the restore process.
Azure Files Data Mover Now Supports StorageClass Mapping
We’ve upgraded our Azure Files data mover to support StorageClass mapping for snapshot PVs during copy backup operations. This enhancement is particularly useful when dealing with Delete Lock settings in Azure Storage Accounts that may hinder the deletion of temporary snapshot PVs post backup. For a deeper dive into this, our KB article titled “Leftover Azure Files PVs after copy backup” offers comprehensive insights.
Image Pull Secret Option in Add Cluster Wizard
In our quest to provide more flexibility, the Add Cluster Wizard now includes an advanced option – Image Pull Secret. This allows you to specify a secret in the cloudcasa-io namespace on your client cluster for pulling CloudCasa agent images from the registry. This feature is especially valuable if you’re using a private registry or need to authenticate to the public registry to avoid throttling. By default, this option is not activated, ensuring simplicity for standard operations.
A crucial note: when modifying the image pull secret for an existing cluster, it’s essential to first remove the agent, set up the secret, and then reinstall the agent.
For guidance on utilizing this feature to bypass Docker Hub pull limits, our KB article “Overcoming Docker Hub Pull Limits by Authenticating” is your go-to resource.
My Permissions Display
Enhancing user accessibility, we’ve added a “My Permissions” button to the User Settings panel. This feature allows users to view their global permissions and specific access to clusters or namespaces, providing clarity and ease in understanding their role and access within the organization.
Downloadable Backup Logs
The backup logs, accessible via the Activity Details page, now include a comprehensive list of all backed-up resources. This addition ensures a more detailed and transparent overview of your backup operations.
Storage Field Adaptation for Azure
Recognizing the uniqueness of Azure blob storage, the “Bucket name” field in the Storage settings has been updated to display the Azure storage account name, enhancing clarity and accuracy for Azure users.
UI Improvements and Recovery Point Filtering
We’ve streamlined the cluster dashboard with more accessible Remove and Edit options and introduced the ability to filter recovery points by cloud, significantly improving usability and navigation.
Compatibility with Azure Container Storage Preview
Working in collaboration with Microsoft, CloudCasa is now fully compatible with the latest preview version of Azure Container Storage, ensuring cutting-edge functionality for our users.
Deprecation of Security Scanning Features
After careful consideration, CloudCasa is deprecating its security scanning features. This decision enables us to focus more on enhancing our core services – backup, restore, disaster recovery, and migration. We recommend Aqua Security’s Trivy tool for your security needs.
Kubernetes Agent Updates
Our Kubernetes agent has undergone several updates to boost performance and resolve bugs. With the automatic update feature, manual updates are typically unnecessary, but we recommend manual updates if automatic updates are disabled.
Important Notes
To ensure optimal performance post-update, users may need to clear their browser cache or restart their browser. This ensures access to the latest version of the CloudCasa web app.
Your feedback is vital to our continuous improvement. You can contact us using the support chat feature in the CloudCasa UI or by emailing support@cloudcasa.io.