In our previous post, "part 1", PostgreSQL Backup and Restore on Microsoft Azure using Kasten K10, we showed how to simply backup and restore a PostgreSQL instance running in an Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster. The workflow presented there is not sufficient to protect your application from serious failure scenarios like accidental snapshot deletion or larger scale outages.  In order to protect against such scenarios, we can leverage Kasten K10’s application mobility and disaster recovery capabilities.  Read more →

This post was co-authored with James Labocki, Red Hat. Enterprises across the globe can now use Red Hat’s OpenShift Kubernetes platform along with Kasten’s K10 software based, data platform to seamlessly rollout, upgrade, and protect their cloud-native applications. Read more →

End-to-End Encryption, huh, yeah! What is it good for? Absolutely everything! Say it again y’all! Sung to the tune of War (What Is It Good For). Apologies to Edwin Starr. Read more →

This blog was co-authored with Jon Owings, Pure Storage.  The results of some alliances are so beneficial that you wonder why the alliance didn’t exist earlier. The partnership we are announcing today between Pure Storage™ and Kasten falls into this category. Enterprises across the world are actively working to not only build cloud native applications, but also to roll out critical Day 2 services, such as Kubernetes application backup and mobility that traditional solutions don’t support. With Pure Storage’s unique all-flash systems coupled with Kasten’s innovative K10 software, your enterprise operations teams now have a Kubernetes solution for flexible storage, backup, and mobility with unparalleled performance and operational simplicity. Read more →

The need for contingency planning has never been more visible! It is exceedingly important to enable application portability so that your operations remain unhindered. With accelerating production deployment of Kubernetes applications, we are excited to announce the availability of version 2.5 of K10, Kasten’s cloud-native data management platform. Some of the world’s largest enterprises are already using K10. The new version adds a unique Cloud-Native Transformation Framework with two very significant capabilities for backup and mobility for Kubernetes applications: Data Transformations and Application Transformations. These capabilities build on the security and operational simplicity pillars of K10 to bring about cloud-native scale for data and deployment portability and flexibility. Read more →

In this blog post, we will walk through how to use Kasten K10 to backup and restore PostgreSQL databases operating in a Kubernetes environment on Microsoft Azure. There are two primary options for running Kubernetes on Azure: Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and Azure Red Hat OpenShift. This blog post is based on AKS.  The fully managed AKS makes deploying and managing containerized applications easy and offers serverless Kubernetes, an integrated continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) experience, and enterprise-grade security and governance. PostgreSQL (often referred to as Postgres), is an Open Source relational database, popular in the cloud-native community. Kasten’s K10 data management platform, it is a secure software-only product that has been purpose-built for Kubernetes and provides operations teams an easy-to-use, scalable, and secure system for backup/restore, disaster recovery, and mobility of Kubernetes applications. Read more →

As we all know, COVID-19, the illness caused by the novel coronavirus has been quickly spreading and worldwide efforts have now concentrated on flattening the curve! To help support these efforts, Kasten is asking all employees in impacted areas to work from home, stopping all travel, and is closing down offices for the near term. There are a number of excellent resources out there that cover how to plan and prepare for these extremely unusual circumstances we all find ourselves in. Instead of covering those, I want to cover how this impacts our customers today and, in the hope that it might be useful to others too, also cover how we have prepared for the ensuing weeks and months to minimize any internal or external disruption. Read more →

Today, we are seeing a large number of customers either already adopting or expressing interest in the use of multiple Kubernetes clusters in every one of their environments (production, staging, dev, etc.). These clusters are often being split across application, security, or team boundaries and the architecture is further complicated by the fact that these clusters will often be deployed across multiple availability zones, regions, clouds, and on-premises data centers. Our observations have also been backed up by this recent CNCF survey that showed that the vast majority of Kubernetes users have deployed multiple production clusters. Read more →

With the increasing growth of stateful applications in Kubernetes, we have also seen the rapid growth in the usage of Ceph to provide storage to cloud-native applications. More often than not, we see Ceph clusters being predominantly deployed via the Rook cloud-native storage orchestrator. In fact even Red Hat, with their release of OpenShift 4, has moved their OpenShift Container Storage (OCS) platform to Rook+Ceph. Read more →

The last twelve months have been momentous for the growth of stateful applications on Kubernetes. There has been innovation in every corner of the ecosystem ranging from higher-level abstractions such as the Container Storage Interface (CSI) and the widespread adoption of this interface by storage vendors, new cloud-native Software-Defined Storage (SDS) systems (e.g., Longhorn), vendor-specific support such as VMware vSphere’s support for First Class Disks (FCDs) and Cloud Native Storage (CNS), the redesign of database systems to use cloud-native architectural principles (e.g., Vitess). Read more →