Kasten by Veeam Extends Backup and Recovery Reach for Kubernetes
Kasten by Veeam today announced it has updated its platform for protecting Kubernetes to include support for multiple clusters and multi-tenant clusters deployed in the cloud.
Niraj Tolia, president and general manager for Kasten by Veeam, says version 3.0 of K10 makes it possible to declaratively define and programmatically apply policies across a fleet of Kubernetes clusters. That capability has become more critical as the number of Kubernetes clusters being deployed across an extended enterprise has begun to rise, notes Tolia. IT teams can also define global policies on a primary cluster and then selectively apply them to secondary clusters.
In addition, Tolia says those policies can be logically applied to multiple distributions of Kubernetes. K10 now makes it possible to search for an individual cluster and then apply policies that would be specific to that cluster.
Finally, this update also adds support for multiple authentication methods, including token-based, OIDC, Red Hat OpenShift OAuth Proxy. That capability is critical because it enables fine-grained role-based access controls, says Tolia.
Protecting Kubernetes clusters is becoming more challenging because each cluster has multiple pods and namespaces. Those clusters are likely to be deployed across not only multiple availability zones and geographic regions but also increasing at the network edge.
Tolia says that increasing level of complexity requires a more centralized approach to protecting those clusters that runs natively on Kubernetes. That approach makes it simpler for IT teams to incorporate K10 within a DevOps workflow, adds Tolia.
Recently acquired by Veeam, Kasten is now an arm of a larger company that has a long history of protecting virtual machine platforms. Veeam has decided to allow the organization to operate independently because it is focused mainly on the needs of DevOps teams running Kubernetes clusters versus traditional IT administrators managing virtual machines.
Regardless of who is managing Kubernetes, the need to protect clusters is becoming a bigger requirement as the number of stateful containerized applications continues to increase. The amount of data now residing on a Kubernetes cluster has substantially increased in the last year as enterprise IT organizations employ the platform to run more complex applications. Previously, most of the container applications deployed were stateless in the sense that they stored data on a platform external to a Kubernetes cluster.
It too early to say whether data protection in Kubernetes environments might one day be fully automated. However, it’s already apparent that the consistency of the application programming interfaces (APIs) defined by the Kubernetes community is starting to have an impact on how data protection is managed. It will be up to each IT organization to determine what level of automation to apply, but the one thing that is clear is many of the mundane tasks associated with protecting data in a legacy IT environment are not going to be required in a cloud-native IT environment.
