Feature Update June 2021

[Bob Adair]

The CloudCasa team has been busy this spring, and is pleased to announce another release of major new features! The following features and improvements became available to all users on Monday 6/21.

Backup of Kubernetes PV data to CloudCasa
Previously CloudCasa would create and manage PV snapshots for you, but now we’ve added the capability to copy those snapshots off to our secure cloud storage as well. Just choose the “Snapshot and copy to CloudCasa” option when you create a Kubernetes backup job. You can also add this option to existing jobs by editing them. This feature will become part of our paid service tier when we introduce it, but for now we are giving all of our free service customers the ability to try it out for a couple of months “on the casa.” We hope you like it!

Snapshots and backups of EBS PVs for EKS clusters
Previously CloudCasa would only support snapshots of persistent volumes of type CSI. However, some cloud providers are still a bit behind the curve when it comes to CSI support, so we’ve now added the ability to snapshot native EBS PVs on AWS EKS clusters. Simply configure your AWS account in CloudCasa as you would for RDS backups, and CloudCasa will automatically detect and handle your EBS PVs!

Selection of RDS databases by tag
We’ve added the ability to create RDS backup jobs that select databases using tags rather than selecting them explicitly. So if you want to create a job that always snapshots all of your RDS database with tags “application:website” and “type:production” you can do it! Tags are evaluated when the backup jobs run, not when you define them, so they will always be up to date as your environment changes.

Azure storage support
The CloudCasa storage cloud spans many regions, but previously they were all AWS-based. We’ve now added several Azure regions as well. If you are an AWS or Azure customer, you can now choose your local region as a backup target so you won’t have to pay network transfer costs. Conversely, if you feel safer with your backups in a different cloud provider or region than the one your infrastructure is running in, you can choose a destination with that in mind. If you are backing up on-premise infrastructure, you may just want to choose a destination with the lowest latency from your network. We will be adding more regions and providers as time goes on.

Ability to select backup destination by cluster and job
Previously you could choose a backup destination for your whole account, but now you can choose destinations at the cluster and backup job level as well. So you can select a default destination for your account, override that with a different setting for a specific cluster, and override that with a different setting for a specific job. The combination should give you all the flexibility you need.

UI improvements
We’ve made many changes to the UI to support the new features and make it easier to use. Some of the more noteworthy ones are:

• Update of the dashboard
• New persistent volume details page
• New detailed activity page
• Drill-through from job status summary in dashboard
• Improved Protection tab
• Job activity log improvements

Kubernetes agent update
Some major changes to our Kubernetes agent were necessary to support all of the new backup functionality. You will need to update existing agents in order to use the new features. If you don’t, you will receive error messages and alerts that indicate what is wrong. Agent and Helm chart updates for partner marketplaces such as Rancher and Digital Ocean may not be available yet, but should be within the next few days. See the FAQ for update instructions.

CloudFormation stack update
Our AWS CloudFormation stack was also updated in order to add the permissions necessary to support EBS PV snapshots. You can re-launch the stack under the Protection/Accounts tab to apply the update to existing accounts.

As always, we want to hear your feedback on new features! You can contact us via the user forum, or by sending email to support@cloudcasa.io.

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