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 is based on AKS.  The fully managed Azure Kubernetes Service (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 →

As we continue to make deep inroads into the Global 2000 list of enterprises, we more often than not run into Red Hat OpenShift running in production within these companies. OpenShift, based on Kubernetes, has been designed to securely “build, deploy and manage your container-based applications consistently across cloud and on-premises infrastructure” and we see it being deployed today not just within private data centers but also in the public cloud. Read more →

We are releasing K10 v2.0.4 today to address three High / Critical severity vulnerabilities reported by the Envoy security team on December 10. These issues can allow untrusted remote clients to crash Envoy or gain privileges that they should not have. Kasten K10, our data management platform that is purpose-built for Kubernetes provides enterprise operations teams an easy-to-use, scalable, and secure system for backup/restore, disaster recovery, and mobility of Kubernetes applications. Read more →

Enterprises all over the world are seeing more cloud-native applications deployed on Kubernetes. This is making Day 2 services such as backup and mobility for Kubernetes applications a pain point for some IT organizations. Kasten K10 v2.0 has been battle-hardened to solve this very pain point as organizations grapple with an easy and reliable way to handle business continuity requirements in this cloud-native environment. Kasten provides a backup and recovery solution on Microsoft Azure that keeps the application as the unit of atomicity while simplifying data management operations and maintaining consistency. Read more →

As I sit and write down my thoughts on KubeCon, the first thing I can think of is “Wow!” This show was amazing on so many levels as there were a number of great talks and keynotes, new companies showing up in the ecosystem, and a general feeling of excitement as cloud-native growth continues to accelerate. Here is my color on the conference, ecosystem, and some of the more interesting conversations I had. Read more →