Learn how to protect applications and persistent storage running on Kubernetes using the HPE CSI Driver for Kubernetes and Kasten K10 by Veeam. The HPE CSI Driver for Kubernetes and Kasten K10 is a jointly supported data management solution, and itโs available immediately. This blog post was co-authored by Gaurav Rishi, Head of Product at Kasten.
Let's think about how stateful applications are run on Kubernetes.
They rely on data that needs to persist beyond the lifecycle of the Pod it's attached to. The data itself, is in most cases just a filesystem. The application doesn't care where that filesystem is served from. Kubernetes ensures the filesystem is present when the Pod starts.
When disaster strikes โ whether a natural disaster, malware or a human factor โ what is needed to ensure the Pod and filesystem find their way together again from a known state? You'll need storage in the form of a device that represents the known state of the filesystem, and metadata to describe the stateful application on Kubernetes. Metadata, data and storage all need to work in complete unison to provide a functional, reliable and complete backup, recovery and data management solution on Kubernetes. In other words, in a Kubernetes environment, you need to keep the entire Kubernetes application as the unit of atomicity for backup and recovery operations โ not as individual piece parts to provide an effective solution.
A New Partnership Emerges
Today, Hewlett Packard Enterprise introduces our partnership with Kasten by Veeam, and the best in class solution combining the HPE CSI Driver for Kubernetes with Kasten K10. The partnership ensures customers and channel partners can build solutions in repeatable patterns across a wide array of Kubernetes ecosystems, and be confident that deployed workloads are perfectly protected and recoverable due to unforeseen events. Kasten K10 is designed from the ground up to run natively in Kubernetes and does not carry any "baggage" from legacy backup and recovery paradigms. This yields much better returns in scale, security, and manageability than traditional data management tools.
Kasten was acquired by Veeam in October of this year, and is an independent Kubernetes Business Unit within Veeam. HPE and Veeam have a long-standing relationship on providing the industry's most robust and flexible solutions for business continuity where stringent service-level objectives are continuously getting narrower โ even as we speak. The HPE Intelligent Data Platform and Veeam Availability Suite v10 awarded Veeam with the prestigious award of HPE Global Technology Partner of the Year 2020.
Kasten K10 provides the next step in the joint partnership between HPE and Veeam as we continue to innovate and evolve with our customers and as applications move into cloud-native paradigms such as Kubernetes.
Let's get into the details of how to take advantage of the HPE Intelligent Data Platform with Kasten K10.
HPE CSI Driver for Kubernetes
The HPE Intelligent Data Platform, HPE Primera, HPE Nimble Storage and HPE Cloud Volumes are all supported by the multi-platform and multi-vendor HPE CSI Driver for Kubernetes. This CSI driver provides all the necessary capabilities to provide persistent storage and data management to Kubernetes using the Container Storage Interface (CSI). HPE has shown relentless innovation by providing additional functionality to Kubernetes in the form of CSI sidecar containers to modify storage attributes during runtime, using standard Kubernetes constructs exposed to end-users.
In this architecture, Kasten K10 uses CSI snapshots by leveraging an annotated Volume Snapshot Class to perform point-in-time copies of the Persistent Volumes Claims (PVC) attached to an application. This activity may subsequently restore those snapshots to new PVCs in the event of a recovery.
The HPE CSI Driver for Kubernetes complies with all the object definitions that Kasten K10 requires to perform backup and recovery.
Kasten K10
Data management on Kubernetes requires extensive knowledge about the intricacies of Kubernetes. Kasten K10 dramatically simplifies this process for the IT/CloudOps team, and runs as a native application in its own namespace on Kubernetes. It integrates seamlessly into the Role-based Access Control (RBAC) model employed on modern Kubernetes clusters to ensure secure access to API objects, and offers self-service portals with appropriate visibility and control.
Backup and Recovery of Applications
Let's kickstart Kasten K10 by demonstrating how we can leverage the HPE CSI Driver for Kubernetes by deploying a simple stateful application that requires persistent storage. We can then quickly deploy Kasten K10 to easily backup and restore the Kubernetes application.
As we can observe in the demonstration, it should be clear as to why we are so excited about the partnership and how data management, backup and recovery of cloud-native applications doesn't have to be more complicated than this.
Next Steps
The HPE CSI Driver for Kubernetes and Kasten K10 as a jointly supported data management solution is available immediately. You'll find more relevant information on how to get started, the alliances and technical product deep-dives in the links below.
- Visit the HPE Storage Container Orchestrator Documentation (SCOD) on how to get started
- Learn more about Kasten K10
- Explore the capabilities of the HPE CSI Driver for Kubernetes
- Find more information on the HPE and Veeam alliance on hpe.com
Don't forget to stop by our booths at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Virtual this week to learn directly from the product experts! We also hang out on the KubeCon Slack community. You'll find us in #HPE and #Kasten.
MichaelMattsson
Data & Storage Nerd, Containers, DevOps, IT Automation
