One platform for every workload: How Cloudeo protects 16,000 clients with Veeam

Through its Cloudeo centre of expertise, OCI provides sovereign hosting and managed services for Odoo, a SaaS platform delivering CRM, ERP, and other business applications. Companies that subscribe to Odoo can choose to host their solutions on OCI’s cloud, where they run in containers orchestrated by Kubernetes. Cloudeo has deployed 764 pods running on ten Kubernetes workers spread across two availability zones in one region to support the managed services it offers.

“At Cloudeo, our core cloud philosophy from day one has been to never offer services without backups,” said Louis Gromb, Cloud DevOps Manager at OCI. “We had many years of experience in backing up traditional workloads using Veeam Data Platform, but it was clear that Kubernetes presented a different challenge.”

The decentralized architecture of cloud-native workloads like Kubernetes means that the approaches used to back up physical servers or virtual machines (VMs) may no longer be appropriate.

“To create Kubernetes backups that we could reliably restore, we had to manually analyze each application we deployed, determine what it was doing, understand its configuration, locate its data storage, decide what to back up, and then write the appropriate Python scripts,” said Gromb. “This took a lot of time, was hard to maintain, and was not scalable as the number of hosted Odoo clients grew.”

Cloudeo wanted to industrialize the backup of Kubernetes environments, so that it could offer highly resilient services without creating an unsustainable workload for its internal team.

Cloudeo selected Veeam Kasten as its Kubernetes backup solution.

“Veeam has been our strategic backup provider for years,” said Gromb. “The ability to source our Kubernetes backup technology from the same vendor was incredibly reassuring. It gave us huge confidence in our decision and added another string to our bow in terms of backup options for our hosted clients.”

Designed to simplify application-centric backup, automate disaster recovery (DR) orchestration, and enable application mobility in Kubernetes, Veeam Kasten provides resilience without complexity. For Cloudeo, the solution makes it easy to define the appropriate backups for each client environment.

“Veeam Kasten automatically backs up the defined applications running in a cluster, and it knows that an application can be both the configuration and the data,” said Gromb. “And because Veeam Kasten communicates directly with the Kubernetes cluster, it gives you a complete overview of everything inside. You tick the boxes for what you want to include, it creates a policy, the policy is validated, and you can go straight into production.”

The openness of Veeam Kasten smoothed its integration into Cloudeo’s existing ecosystem, since the company was able to natively connect its standard open-source monitoring tools like Prometheus.

“We didn't need to learn about a proprietary monitoring system or change our tool; Veeam Kasten fit comfortably into our existing working practices,” said Gromb. “It’s a product that stays true to the cloud-native community, which is built around open source and sharing. It orchestrates software components that are themselves open source, but with a level of service and automation that would have required months and months of R&D on our end to achieve similar results.”

With Veeam Kasten in place, Cloudeo no longer has to spend considerable time and effort setting up and maintaining Kubernetes backups on a case-by-case basis. The solution also makes it easy to specify per-client retention policies, verify backups, and manage the full data-resilience lifecycle.

“Using Veeam Kasten, we’ve been able to create a backup system that's resilient, uses cloud-native storage, and aligns with our policy of having a backup for everything — essentially without changing the way we operate,” said Gromb. “If there's ever a problem with a cluster, we know we can rely on Veeam Kasten to restore it to another location.”

• Extends data resilience to new Kubernetes environments
  “Veeam Kasten represents a paradigm shift for OCI and Cloudeo,” said Gromb. “For cloud-native workloads, we no longer need physical backups as long as we have Veeam Kasten application backups, which are resilient and portable.”
• Simplifies and automates the configuration and management of backups
  Cloudeo used Veeam Kasten to industrialize the set-up and ongoing management of tailored backups for every Odoo client’s Kubernetes environment.
• Saves significant time and effort across the data resilience lifecycle
  In addition to using Veeam Kasten to accelerate initial configuration, Cloudeo has built a workflow that manages hierarchies of backups by client, date, environment, and database, which automatically handles retention and deletion according to preset policies.