Today Veeam has acquired Kasten. This acquisition is focused on offering a pathway to achieving a multi-platform backup strategy leveraging both data protection technologies that now covers physical, virtual and containerised workloads..  In the Kubernetes eco-system, 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 number of synergies between Veeam and Kasten with both companies sharing 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.

As container adoption and usage continues to explode, Kubernetes-native backup is one of the most critical challenges faced by Kubernetes operators today. Kubernetes, the fastest-growing infrastructure platform, is quickly becoming the foundation for all applications, no matter where they might be deployed. Its ubiquitous nature has it on track to be the next enterprise platform of choice, joining the ranks of Linux and vSphere.

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!

For those unfamiliar with Kasten, the video below is a great example of Kasten at work… this is a tough ecosystem to navigate and have conversations around… especially for those who are new to containerisation and cloud native applications. I am not ashamed to say that I am still learning, but It gets even more tricky when trying to talk to customers, partners or the application creators themselves about the backing up and protecting of those applications.

This video shows Kasten’s value proposition clearly

Because of the ambiguity and relative early adoption of Kubernetes and containers, backup, disaster recovery and application mobility becomes more relevant and this is where Kasten’s K10 Platform comes into play.

Below is a great high level architectural overview of the solution… again, importantly built and deployed ontop of Kubernetes, making it truly cloud native.Kasten Architecture

Due to this rapid application growth and increased production deployments at scale, enterprises are now focused on “Day 2” production challenges such as data management, security, and observability. While Kubernetes takes away a lot of the pain of ensuring high availability and scalability of your application services, these benefits do not extend to your data, making data management of Kubernetes applications a critical priority.

Final Thoughts

Kasten lines up with core Veeam philosophies 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. None the less… the following are a critical cornerstones to Kasten’s success.

  • Architecture
  • Recoverability
  • Operations
  • Security
  • Portability

For more details around the the K10 Platform, the acquisition and more, head to the Veeam Landing page that covers the solution. 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.veeam.com/blog/kasten-acquisition-announcement.html