In the realm of government institutions in Brazil, regional electoral courts hold a pivotal role in ensuring the integrity of the electoral process. These institutions are mandated to safeguard their essential electoral data through off-site backup solutions. While Kubernetes’ efficiency and flexibility hold great promise for modernizing operations, government data protection challenges have deterred many regional electoral courts from embracing this technology. However, this Kubernetes backup and recovery case study demonstrates how the Tribunal Regional Eleitoral Court or TRE in Pará, Brazil, successfully harnessed Kubernetes’ potential while ensuring robust data security through the use of CloudCasa.

The Challenge: Data Protection in Kubernetes for Government Institutions

Kubernetes, known for its efficiency, scalability, and portability, has revolutionized application development and deployment. However, its advantages often lead to complex environments with insufficient controls, especially when it comes to safeguarding critical data. For government institutions like Brazilian regional electoral courts, data loss or tampering could have severe consequences. Local Kubernetes snapshots, on their own, do not meet the stringent requirements for off-site backup and adherence to government regulations.

The Solution: CloudCasa and its Benefits

In this case study, regional electoral court found a breakthrough solution with CloudCasa. This cloud-native backup-as-a-service platform revolutionized their Kubernetes environment while ensuring government data protection, adherence to government regulations, and enhanced administration. Here’s how CloudCasa addressed their challenges:

1. Off-Site Backup Made Easy

Using CloudCasa, Kubernetes clusters built on SUSE Rancher on Longhorn storage, were easily managed and protected. Kubernetes clusters were effortlessly snapshotted and copied to an AWS bucket owned and managed by CloudCasa. This backup process included large PostgreSQL databases, streamlined through pre-built application hooks accessible via a user-friendly web-based GUI. Once protected, the clusters and applications can be recovered to the original location, or migrated to different clusters for disaster recovery, prod/staging testing, infrastructure upgrades, etc.

2. As-a-Service Convenience

Government institutions often grapple with limited resources, making the “as-a-service” approach a necessity. CloudCasa’s platform allowed the regional electoral court to register their clusters and seamlessly backup data to the cloud. With no need for software or hardware installation and no requirement to manage cloud object storage, the institution could focus their limited resources on their core responsibilities.

3. Consistent Pricing Model

Unlike traditional Kubernetes backup providers that often base pricing on the number of worker nodes or clusters, CloudCasa introduced a capacity-based pricing model. This flexibility aligned perfectly with the Regional Electoral Court’s growing Kubernetes footprint, eliminating concerns about predicting the exact number of nodes and clusters needed in the future. This pricing model allows for flexibility and growth over a multi-year subscription, without having to worry about a need to add worker nodes or additional clusters.

“CloudCasa has a rich and yet simple to use cloud dashboard, with the possibility to manage multiple clusters and perform backups and restores among them all with a single license.” Manoel Frederico Beltrão, Judicial Analyst at Tribunal Regional Eleitoral do Pará.

4. Streamlined Administration

One of the major bottlenecks in Kubernetes management is often the administrative complexity. With CloudCasa, registration of new clusters and agent installation on those clusters is simple and straightforward. After signing up and creating an account at CloudCasa.io, registration of Kubernetes clusters is a simple process: add the cluster info and install the CloudCasa agent on the cluster. For end users with Kubernetes hosted in the cloud, this is even easier, as the clusters are auto-discovered after adding the cloud account to CloudCasa. Once the cluster is registered, the CloudCasa agent can be installed via yaml files using a quick kubectl command. To make things even easier for the Regional Electoral Court, for SUSE Rancher users, the CloudCasa agent could be installed directly through the Rancher marketplace, reducing manual intervention and potential errors.

5. Seamless Upgrades

One of the key advantages for the Regional Electoral Court was the ability to perform upgrades without disruption. With CloudCasa, they migrated from SUSE Rancher v2.5.11 to v2.7.1 seamlessly. Instead of performing the upgrade in-place and interrupting the Kubernetes workloads, they simply took a snapshot of the cluster and application data running on the old version of Rancher, created a new cluster using the new version of Rancher, and performed a cross-cluster recovery to migrate the data from the old cluster to the new cluster.

Beyond Compliance, CloudCasa Transforms Kubernetes Management

While the initial motivation for exploring CloudCasa was compliance with government regulations, Regional Electoral Court realized the true potential of the platform. Beyond data protection, CloudCasa provided a comprehensive solution that simplified Kubernetes administration, streamlined backup and restore processes, and facilitated seamless upgrades. With its user-friendly interface and commitment to meeting the unique needs of government institutions, CloudCasa has ushered in a new era of efficient and secure Kubernetes management.

To discover more about CloudCasa’s transformative capabilities and explore how it can revolutionize your Kubernetes environment. You can try the free service plan for CloudCasa, no strings attached. Feel free to reach out with any comments or feedback regarding CloudCasa and your cloud-native backup requirements. Embrace the future of Kubernetes management with CloudCasa’s cutting-edge solutions.this