Kubernetes Persistent Volume Backup
Just in time for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2021, Catalogic Software launched the general availability of its paid service for CloudCasa, a powerful Kubernetes backup service that is easy to use, affordable and comes with a generous free service tier. With our Activate Your Kubernetes Persistent volume Backup Superpower theme at KubeCon, CloudCasa unleashes the backup superpower for DevOps and IT teams. They can now be confident that their enterprise Kubernetes data is protected and tamper proof, while at the same time, they can be sure they are only paying for the data they are protecting, and not for how many clusters or worker nodes their Kubernetes applications are using.
With the addition of paid service tiers, CloudCasa as a SaaS backup application offers the following value to its customers:
- Users pay only for their data being protected – no software costs, no storage to purchase, no infrastructure to provision.
- Free Service Tier – forever – unlimited snapshots and Kubernetes resource data protected with up to 30 days retention.
- Free Kubernetes Persistent Volume (PV) snapshot management – forever – users will never pay for orchestrating snapshots.
- Free Amazon RDS snapshot management – multi-region copies with no limits on databases or accounts.
- Backups are safe and secure – backups are air-gapped and locked from deletion by any API call.
Why CloudCasa for Protecting Kubernetes and Cloud Databases
While everyone else was frolicking safely in the sun this summer, the CloudCasa team was toiling away on this major feature release. Of course, we did some of that toiling in the sun. We have laptops, after all. But toiling in the sun sounds even worse, doesn’t it?
In any case, we are happy to launch and demonstrate at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2021 the following major new features for CloudCasa.
Paid Service Plans
While our free service still offers the same great features as before, with several new ones thrown in for good measure, this release introduces our paid service offerings. The paid service plans give users access to more great features and our top notch support team. We hope you’ll consider upgrading!
GA of PV Backup to Secure Storage
Backups of Kubernetes PVs via our “Snapshot and copy to CloudCasa” feature is now Generally Available (GA). This allows users to protect their PV data by backing it up to our secure cloud storage. It’s the backbone of our paid service plans.
Users of our promotional 5 TB backup storage plan (that was only for the beta) must upgrade to our Starter plan more. However, we continue to offer a smaller 100 GB promotion for free users who want to try it out.
Tamper Proof Backups via SafeLock™
The new SafeLock feature allows users to mark backups as being undeletable until they expire. This prevents attackers, malware, rogue software, or rogue users from deleting critical backups. Retention times for recovery points that have SafeLock enabled can be increased but not decreased. This can be useful for legal holds or ransomware recovery efforts, and it can be enabled via policies or on individual recovery points. SafeLock is only available with a paid service plan.
Amazon EKS Cluster Auto-Discovery
CloudCasa can now automatically discover new Amazon EKS clusters if users have added their AWS accounts under the Protection tab. For users of the Amazon RDS database protection features, they’ve probably already done this. Once discovered, new clusters appear under Protection/Clusters with the state “Discovered.” If users want to protect the new cluster, they can simply click on it and follow the instructions. If it’s a test instance or some other cluster that doesn’t need protection, one can choose the ignore option to hide it.
This automation feature helps prevent newly created Amazon EKS clusters from falling through the cracks when it comes to data protection!
Application Hooks
To guarantee that stateful applications like databases are in the proper state to be backed up, application hooks allow pre-backup and post-backup commands to be executed in specified containers on a cluster. Users can also define post-restore commands for the flip side of the process.
Application hooks can be defined under the Configuration tab and referenced from backup definitions. We’ll soon be introducing a library of pre-defined application hooks for common applications.
API Keys
Users can now generate API keys for use with the CloudCasa API. This allows users to create automation workflow to do things like add and remove clusters, define backups, trigger backups and restores, and more. The API Keys are created and managed through the new API Keys page under the Preferences tab, and they are only available with a paid service plan.
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
Now a standard security practice, we’ve added the option to enable MFA for CloudCasa logins. CloudCasa supports common Time-based One-Time Password (TOTP) apps such as Microsoft Authenticator, Google Authenticator, and Authy for a second authentication factor.
This new option is available under Preferences/User Settings ─ just toggle it on and hit Save. Users will be logged out and sent back to the Sign In page. After re-authenticating with their password, users will be presented with an MFA configuration page, where one can simply simple scan the QR code to configure the authentication app. On subsequent logins, one will be prompted for the OTP code after entering a password.
We encourage all users to enable MFA!
Kubernetes Agent Update
Significant changes were made to the CloudCasa Kubernetes agent to improve performance, support the new version of Kubernetes, and squash a few bugs. Users should update existing agents in order to use the new features. Agent and Helm chart updates for partner marketplaces such as SUSE Rancher and DigitalOcean are available also. See the CloudCasa FAQ for updated instructions.
CloudFormation Stack Update
CloudCasa’s AWS CloudFormation stack was also updated to add the permissions necessary to Amazon EKS cluster auto-discovery. Users can re-launch the stack under the Protection/Accounts tab to apply the update to existing accounts.
Other Release Notes
We’ve changed the URLs of our authentication pages, so if a user is using a password manager they may need to update it or manually enter the password from their first log in.
With some browsers, users may need to restart, hit Control-F5, and/or clear the cache to verify it’s the latest version of the CloudCasa web app when first logging in after the update. If one doesn’t, they may see only a “Please Wait” dialog that won’t go away.
As always, we want to hear feedback on new features! Anyone can contact us via the user forum, using the new support chat feature, or by sending an email to support@cloudcasa.io
Ryan Kaw
Da Li