Feature Update September 2021

[Bob Adair]

While everyone else was frolicking in the sun this summer, the CloudCasa team was toiling away. 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, it was all worthwhile because today we’re happy to announce the release of a slew of major new features for CloudCasa.

Premium 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 marks the introduction of our premium paid service offerings. The paid service plans give you access to more great features and premium support. We hope you’ll consider upgrading!

GA of PV backup to CloudCasa

Backups of Kubernetes persistent volumes via our “Snapshot and copy to CloudCasa” feature is now GA. This allows users to protect their PV data by backing it up to our secure cloud storage. It’s the backbone of our premium service plans.

We’re not offering the promotional 5TB to free users anymore (that was only for the beta), but we are offering a smaller 100GB promotion for free users who want to try it out.

SafeLock

The new SafeLock feature allows you to mark backups as being undeletable until they expire. This prevents attackers, malware, rogue software, or rogue users from deleting your critical backups. Retention times for recover points that have SafeLock enabled can be increased, but not decreased. This can be useful for legal holds or ransomware recovery efforts. It can be enabled via policies or on individual recover points. SafeLock will only be available with a paid service plan.

EKS cluster auto-discovery

CloudCasa can now automatically discover new EKS clusters if you’ve added your AWS accounts under the Protection tab. If you’ve been using our RDS database protection features, you’ve probably already done this. Once discovered, new clusters appear under Protection/Clusters with the state “Discovered”. If you want to protect the new cluster, you can simply click on it and follow the instructions. If it’s a test instance or some other cluster that doesn’t need protection, you can choose the ignore option to hide it.
This will help to prevent newly created EKS clusters from falling through the cracks when it comes to data protection!

Application hooks

This new feature allows you to guarantee that stateful applications like databases are in the proper state to be backed up by executing pre-backup and post-backup commands in specified containers on your cluster. You 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

You can now generate API keys for use with the CloudCasa API. This will allow you to create your own automation to do things like add and remove clusters, define backups, trigger backups and restores, and more. They are created and managed through the new API Keys page under the Preferences tab. We’ll be making API documentation available soon. API keys will only be available with a paid service plan.

Multi-factor authentication

We’ve added the option to enable MFA for your CloudCasa login. We now support common TOTP apps such as Microsoft Authenticator, Google Authenticator, and Authy for your second authentication factor. The new option is available under Preferences/User Settings. Just toggle it on and hit “Save”. You will be logged out and sent back to the Sign In page. After re-authenticating with your password, you will be presented with an MFA configuration page, where you can simply simple scan the QR code to configure your authentication app. On subsequent logins you’ll be prompted for your OTP code after entering your password.

We encourage all users to enable MFA!

Kubernetes agent update

We’ve made some significant changes to our Kubernetes agent to improve performance, support the new version of Kubernetes, and squash a few bugs. You should update existing agents in order to use the new features. 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 for EKS cluster auto-discovery. You can re-launch the stack under the Protection/Accounts tab to apply the update to existing accounts.

Other Notes

We’ve changed the URLs of our authentication pages, so if you are using a password manager you may need to update it or manually enter your password when you first log in.

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. If you don’t, you may see only a “Please Wait” dialog that won’t go away.

Sorry for the inconvenience!

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

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