GCP Benefits Kubernetes Data Protection

TFiR has produced its brand-new video show called Let’s See. This is the first time that TFiR has come up with a demo show where we will get to see how some of the technologies and products work. In this very first episode of TFiR Let’s See, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with – Field CTO Americas, Martin Phan and Cloud Architect Sebastian Glab from CloudCasa by Catalogic – to discuss and demonstrate CloudCasa’s native integration with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) that enables Kubernetes Data Protection and Kubernetes Data Migration. 

Demystifying the myth, that cloud will take care of everything 

Martin highlights that although the cloud makes a lot of things simpler, there are some key challenges that one must still think about, for example, data protection. Cloud is awesome in terms of its ability to provide users with a quick and efficient compute and raw storage with a guarantee that they’re not going to lose users’ data. But they do not necessarily guarantee that they will be able to restore their data.

As a result, it becomes difficult for users to protect different versions of their data and be able to repurpose data for other use cases. Another challenge is when users are spinning a new service, they don’t want to run monitoring in production, but they want to report on production data. All the queries that are running in the background consume processes and computes away from hosting the production applications.  

Solving these challenges with CloudCasa 

CloudCasa aims to bridge the gap between the cloud vendors and take out some of the complexity of restoring and data migration between different clouds. Native integration with GCP and other cloud providers helps with Cloud to Cloud Migration and Recovery services with the addition of GKE backup and GKE recovery. CloudCasa provides a central location to manage all the credentials and discover all the Kubernetes clusters or applications you have running within a project or within a cloud service. The Kubernetes data migration use case in Any2Cloud recovery protects the data and provides a recovery point. Users can spin up a more economical cloud to run reports without impacting production services.  

Video demonstration: Sebastian demonstrates the steps you need to take to get started: add a Google Cloud account to CloudCasa and perform an audit discovery of clusters within the accounts. In the video he takes us through a GKE backup and restoring it to a different cluster scenario. If a user has more than one cloud account, they can also perform a cross account migration. CloudCasa takes advantage of some of the unique API sets available from each respective cloud.

For example, with Amazon, we’re hooking directly into CloudFormation stack, for Microsoft Azure we use the Azure Resource Manager and with Google, we are hooking directly into the Google Kubernetes Engine service, as Sebastian demonstrated through the deployment of our aging template directly on the cloud service itself. 

Key benefits of CloudCasa’s offering with GCP for GKE backup and GKE recovery 

Martin talks about the value CloudCasa is bringing to this ecosystem, with its native GCP integration to enable Kubernetes data protection and Kubernetes data migration. Here are the top five reasons why Cloud Casa is the best choice for GKE backup and GKE recovery. 

1. CloudCasa is primarily a software as a service which means users don’t require any infrastructure to set up and manage GKE backups with CloudCasa. 
2. We have a direct cloud native integration with the different cloud providers including GCP. Sebastian demos one with regards to GKE backup and restore and how easy it is to configure a Google account and perform the audit discovery of your clusters within those accounts. 
3. CloudCasa aims to be as cloud-agnostic and platform-agnostic as possible with its service. We support these different infrastructures and different cloud accounts to bridge the gap between the other cloud vendors dealing with different storage class types etc. 
4. Users can get started for free. They can log into our website, sign up for their own free account and start backing up the cloud accounts, their on-prem Kubernetes clusters through local snapshots. 
5. Lastly CloudCasa has very transparent pricing (CloudCasa pricing plans). We only care about the amount of data that you backup and aren’t concerned about the infrastructure you’re running or how many nodes you have. All we really care about is the amount of data that you backup.

There is a value to protecting different versions of your data, but more so being able to reuse and repurpose your data for other use cases. CloudCasa introduced native integration with Google Kubernetes Engine and enabled GKE backup and GKE recovery. This integration enables our Any2cloud Recovery feature ties the Kubernetes data protection and Kubernetes data migration functionality all together.

Users can backup their on-prem Kubernetes services or their cloud managed services, and then spin up or build a new Kubernetes cluster in any one of these three cloud providers, Amazon, Microsoft or Google. CloudCasa will provide a central location from which you can manage all of your credentials and be able to discover, backup and migrate data for all the Kubernetes clusters or applications that you have running within that project or within that cloud service.