As Kubernetes applications grow in number and scale in diverse deployment environments, organizations face a shortage of skilled personnel whether it be DevOps or Platform Ops to ensure that critical data management functions like backup, disaster recovery (DR), and application mobility are in place. In other words, organizations need to not only transition to a new, modern cloud-native development technology and workflow, but they require operations at scale without having an army of certified Kubernetes administrators. This is where Kasten K10 shines by scaling simplicity. Grab a cup of coffee, and let’s take a short tour of the new capabilities introduced in Kasten K10 V5.5 and how they can benefit you.
With this release, Kasten by Veeam scales simplicity of operations to bridge the Kubernetes skills gap with powerful capabilities, including autonomous operations and cloud-native expansion.
Autonomous operations with Kasten K10 V5.5
Augmenting an organization’s workforce so that the enterprise can realize cloud-native technology and operational benefits by automating several data management tasks is one of the key benefits of this release. Here are the underlying building blocks introduced in this version to make this possible:
Intelligent policies
Kasten K10 capabilities for intelligent decisions that simplify data protection at scale. Release V5.5 supports:
- Backup windows: As the number of applications running in your Kubernetes clusters increases, they have diverse usage patterns (e.g., a payroll application vs. an order booking application). With Kasten K10 V5.5, you can now factor in the application’s non-peak usage hours and specify a backup window accordingly. In addition to reducing disruption, Kasten K10 automatically resolves dependencies across multiple backup windows and limits settings with incompatible schedules.
- Job staggering: Kasten K10 will not only honor the backup windows but will further automate the sequencing of the underlying backup jobs, thereby optimizing the utilization of the underlying infrastructure. In addition to overcoming target storage or network bottlenecks, Kasten K10 can handle conflict resolution when multiple policies are scheduled in a particular time window.
- Declarative policies: Operations teams can define multiple protection policies that specify parameters such as backup frequency and location. A catalog of organizational policies and SLAs can be provided to development teams with an intimate knowledge of application requirements, without disclosing credential and storage infrastructure implementation. This ensures separation of concerns while scaling operations in a cloud-native environment.
The benefits of these intelligent policies span across multiple teams in an enterprise. Developers can continue to focus on app development while influencing and enabling backup policies with capabilities such as declarative policies. Platform Ops teams can optimize resources and automate data protections tasks across distributed Kubernetes clusters with backup windows and job staggering. And enterprise compliance and security teams gain visibility and peace of mind on data protection and coverage.
In addition to intelligent policies, we have also added capabilities that again bridge the skills gap and ensure your backups remain the last line of defense, even when operating at scale:
Helm wizard
As organizations face diverse deployment options with multiple installation options, they run into complexities of authoring long YAML manifests. Kasten K10 further eases the onboarding process by providing an intuitive graphical wizard that enables you generate the most suitable install manifests, which can be visualized and repeated for multiple installs.
IPv6 support
IP address exhaustion is a here-and-now issue that organizations using IPv4 face. This is further exacerbated with the growing proliferation of edge deployments with a growing number of devices and addressing needs. Kasten K10 addresses this issue by operating in IPv6 environments, such as Amazon EKS, where even the inter-pod communication uses this extended IP addressing scheme to securely scale.
GitOps pipeline integration
Defining your application and configuration as code and enabling feature velocity with CI/CD is one of the key benefits provided by GitOps. However, protecting an application’s run-time data in a GitOps environment is critical. Kasten K10’s integration into GitOps workflows paves the way to keep your most valuable assets protected in a seamless and structured way. This helps to simplify operations at scale and yet keep your data protected from accidental or malicious attacks.
Cloud-native expansion
Born as a Kubernetes-native application, Kasten K10 has always been at the forefront of leveraging as well as contributing to the cloud-native ecosystem. As Kubernetes usage becomes mainstream, the capabilities and challenges the community is tackling are increasing in scope and impact. The cloud-native expansion vectors include increasing workload types, geographic regions, storage types, and security. Let’s look at a few examples that exemplify this as a part of Kasten K10 V5.5:
New workloads with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization
OpenShift Virtualization enables you to run and manage virtual machine (VM) and container workloads side-by-side on Red Hat OpenShift. Kasten K10 has always had a cohesive integration with Red Hat to provide backup, disaster recovery, and application mobility for cloud-native container workloads. Kasten K10 V5.5 now adds support for VM workloads in OpenShift environments, enabling enterprises to fast-track their Digital Transformation initiatives by bringing applications that were not developed with cloud-native constructs onto OpenShift as VMs. We are excited about this development, and we will continue to play an active role in meeting our customers where they are, as well as innovating with the community.
We are also pleased to announce support for Red Hat OpenShift V4.10 and a graphical user interface for the K10 Operator for OpenShift that provides the benefits of simplicity when deploying and operating Kasten K10.
Expanded geographic options
Kasten K10 customers continue to grow and are distributed across the globe with clusters operating in public cloud, data centers, and edge locations. We continue to support this freedom of choice with added support for new regions, including Jakarta (AWS) and Milan (GCP). You can also learn about Kasten K10’s application mobility capabilities with dynamic transformations across clusters, geographies, and infrastructure providers here.
Expanded storage options
- VMware: Kasten K10 supports backup and DR operations at scale and with enhanced security in VMware Tanzu environments. We now support NFS as a target storage in block mode for these environments as well, so that customers who either don’t have access to object stores or want to leverage existing investments in NFS for storing their backups on premises can do so easily.
- Azure Files: Kasten K10 supports Azure Blob as a target store, and with this release, we also have added support for Azure Files as another option for storing backups.
Enhancing security
Backups are the last line of defense for an organization, and Kasten is committed to ensuring that enterprises have a simple and safe solution to depend on. This drives our ongoing investments, ranging from ransomware recovery to data protection policy guardrails, to customer managed keys. This release furthers our resolve on this important foundational pillar with initiatives that include:
- Azure-managed identity: Kasten K10 further simplifies security with support for Azure-managed identities, removing the headaches (and risks) of managing credentials, and allowing authentication with any resource that supports Azure Active Directory authentication.
- Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF): Supply chain security is a top-of-mind concern for organizations today, and with projects like Alpha-Omega, OpenSSF provides resources and a framework to improve the security posture of the supply chain.
Kasten K10 V5.5 is shipping and available as a free download. We invite you to experience it for yourself. Try Kasten K10 for free today.