Yesterday Veeam and Kasten announced a strategic partnership focused on offering a pathway to achieving a multi-platform backup strategy levering both data protection technologies.  For those who have been paying attention to the Kubernetes space, Kasten has quickly established its self as a top technology platform for the protection and data management of Kubernetes infrastructure and workloads. There are a lot of synergies between the companies and we both share common philosophies around simplicity and flexibility… something which is inherently hard to achieve in the cloud native landscape. As well as that. Kasten offers an agnostic approach with support for ecosystem components across the entire application stack.

Veeam and Kasten have partnered to address the container-native data protection needs for enterprises. This partnership spans sales, marketing, and technology so enterprises can continue to depend on the leaders in ensuring business continuity and freedom of choice.

The concept of Containerization backups has been one which the industry has struggled with for a long time. As far back as I can remember when I started playing with Docker there have been questions around how you would backup a container… should you back them up? …do you need to back them up? Now that Kubernetes has taken containers beyond just a stateless entity and more towards an end to end control, management and data plane it’s become apparent that organisations looking to use Kubernetes as their control plane be given options to backup critical pieces. Apart from the rise of Kubernetes in the Cloud Native and Public Cloud spaces, the release of vSphere 7 with VMware vSphere with Kubernetes has somewhat legitimized Kubernetes to the traditional virtualization masses… including myself!

With that, backup becomes more relevant and this is where Kasten’s K10 Platform comes into play.

For more details around the the K10 Platform, the partnership and more, head to the Veeam Blog post that introduces the partnership. There is also a WhitePaper available as described below:

Veeam is partnering with Kasten, the leader in backup solutions for containerized workloads, to address cloud-native data protection needs for enterprises. Kasten’s K10 Data Management Platform helps you achieve the five best practices described in the white paper

It’s a good read as it goes through some of the rational behind the need for backups in the Kubernetes world, and also covers the points below which again, line up with Veeam philosophies all while extending this out to more common cloud native pillars… specifically operations and security. Why I single those out is because in the virtual or physical world, I believe there are less holes to navigate when it comes to backups. More or less because the platforms are simpler and less scattered than the cloud native landscape.

  • Architecture
  • Recoverability
  • Operations
  • Security
  • Portability

Kasten can be easily installed locally following this Blog from Niraj Tolia or deployed from most major Public Cloud Platforms… though I would suggest giving it a spin in GCP first deployable from the MarketPlace.

References: 

https://www.kasten.io/partner-veeam

https://www.veeam.com/blog/kasten-partnership-kubernetes-backup.html