The holiday season is nearly upon us, and 2024 is rapidly drawing to a close. It’s been a very busy year for the CloudCasa team, but we’re pleased to be able to roll out one more feature update before 2025. The whole CloudCasa team would like to wish all of you Happy Holidays and a happy, healthy, and productive new year!
Running Multiple Jobs Concurrently
Until now, only one backup, restore, or delete operation was allowed to run on a cluster at a time. With this release, it is now possible to run multiple operations concurrently.
There are some limitations:
- Full cluster backups, delete backup jobs, and restore jobs with the option “Include all cluster-scoped resources” selected run exclusively. This means no other jobs are allowed to run while any one of these is running.
- Two jobs that backup or restore the same namespace cannot run at the same time.
- The snapshot phase of backup jobs (where PVCs are snapshotted) is still serialized, but since most of the run time of a backup is spent doing data transfer, this should not have much of an impact. This limitation may be removed in the future.
A new Maximum Concurrent Jobs option has been added to the Add Cluster and Edit Cluster panes under “Advanced options”. It is set to 1 by default, but can be changed to any value between 1 and 32. Note that for higher values, you may need to adjust CPU/memory limits for the containers “kubeagent” and “backup helper”. See below for details.
The only time a job will be skipped now is when another job from the same definition is currently running. In all other cases, jobs are queued instead.
You may see new namespaces with the name pattern “cloudcasa-io-<ORIG-NS>” appear while backup jobs are running. They will be removed when the jobs complete.
Note that if you are backing up Azure Files PVs using the CSI driver method, you should leave concurrency set to 1. If the CloudCasa method is used, higher concurrency is supported.
Configuring CPU/memory Requests and Limits for Agent
You can now configure CPU/memory requests and limits for three containers in the agent pods, namely:
- kubeagent manager
- kubeagent
- backup helper
To do this, go to “Edit” => “Advanced options” -> “Resource config”. After changing values, you can either wait for auto update, click on “Re-deploy” agent in cluster Edit page, or delete cloudcasa-io namespace and re-install the agent. For “kubeagent manager”, only the first two methods will work. However, it is highly unlikely that you will need to change values for kubeagent manager. Note that there is currently no validation of the values entered. So please do make sure that “request” values are less than “limits” and also that you use correct format. For details, see here. This will be improved in future releases.
Update Agent Button
In the Edit Cluster pane, the label of the “Update Agent” button has been changed to to “Re-deploy agent”, although its function has not changed. The button is also now visible all the time instead of only when a new version is available. When a new version is available, a warning messages will now appear in the upper right corner of the pane to indicate it. Some changes to cluster advanced options such as Resource config require that the agent be re-deployed before they will take effect, and this change in intended to ease that process.
Kubernetes Agent Updates
In this update we’ve again made several changes to our Kubernetes agent to add features, improve performance, and fix bugs. However, manual updates shouldn’t normally be necessary anymore because of the automatic agent update feature. If you have automatic updates disabled for any of your agents, you should update them manually as soon as possible.
Notes
With some browsers you may need to restart, hit Control-F5, and/or clear the cache to make sure you have the latest version of the CloudCasa web app when first logging in after the update. You can also try selectively removing cookies and site data for cloudcasa.io if you encounter any odd behavior.
As always, we want to hear your feedback on new features! You can contact us using the support chat feature, or by sending email to support@cloudcasa.io.
CloudCasa
Ryan Kaw