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 →

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 →

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 →

Dec 27: Updated to use the Rook v1.2.0 release. With the rise of stateful applications in Kubernetes and the rapid adoption of the Container Storage Interface (CSI) by both Kubernetes distributions and storage vendors, it is now rare to find a public or private Kubernetes offering that does not support stateful applications out of the box. However, we still haven’t seen the same out-of-the-box experience with Kubernetes installed on developer machines and local test environments. Read more →

We are excited to announce the general availability of Version 2.0 of K10, Kasten’s cloud-native data management platform. Already resonating with enterprise operations professionals interested in addressing critical Day 2 issues, K10 version 2.0 includes important new features that address two of the greatest pain points plaguing expanding Kubernetes deployments today: security and operational simplicity. Security to Keep Your Data Safe Arguably among your most precious resources, the safety of your corporate data is paramount, not only for regulatory compliance but also as a matter of sound, ethical business practice. Read more →

We are often asked why traditional data management platforms that have worked extremely well for virtualized environments have failed to keep pace with the requirements of applications deployed on container orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes. In particular, as more stateful applications get deployed on cloud-native platforms, the requirement for data management functions such as backup and recovery, disaster recovery, and application mobility is becoming extremely pressing. As a part of our research when building K10, a cloud-native data management platform to meet the needs mentioned above, we have discovered that there is a fundamental impedance mismatch between solutions built for VMs vs. Read more →