The Top 10 Kubernetes Backup And Storage Solutions

Afi is a Kubernetes backup solution that provides extensive, automated data backup for all K8s cloud services and distributions. It enables cross-cluster and cross-cloud restore and migration features.

Who it’s for: Organizations seeking a fully automated, robust Kubernetes backup solution that requires minimal manual intervention, with extensive security features.

Benefits: Afi stands out for its AI-powered security engine and automatic resource discovery, which simplifies the backup process. A Google-like full-text search capability helps teams quickly recover data.

• The solution provides automated full-fidelity backup for K8s applications, infrastructure, and data, ensuring resilient, zero-maintenance protection.
• Restores entire clusters or only selected application components, to the same or a different target environment.
• It offers detailed access control and data residency policies, making it suitable for users of varying roles and seniority levels.
• The AI-powered security engine helps prevent data loss during cyber-attacks and detects vulnerabilities in cluster configurations.

The bottom line: Afi.ai offers a comprehensive, fully automated Kubernetes backup solution. It is a cost-effective solution, you can license just the nodes they protect, and don’t need to pay for storage if you have your own storage facilities.

• Afi.ai is headquartered in California and serves customers globally. They also provide a backup solution for Google Workspace and Microsoft 365.

AppsCode Stash is a Kubernetes-native disaster recovery solution that enables users to efficiently backup and restore their data volumes and databases across Kubernetes clusters in any public or private cloud environment.

Who it’s for: Kubernetes administrators needing a reliable, efficient, and secure disaster recovery solution for diverse storage and database environments.

Benefits: AppCode Stash stands out for its seamless integration with Kubernetes and support for various storage services and databases.

• Stash uses Custom Resource Definitions (CRD) to schedule backups, allowing users to manage backups similarly to workload deployments.
• It integrates with AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob Storage, and Kubernetes persistent volumes.
• Stash supports deduplication by only uploading modified components since the last backup, optimizing storagage uses.
• All backed up data is encrypted with AES-256, so it’s secure even if it leaks from the backend.

The bottom line: AppCode offers a complete backup and recovery solution for Kubernetes. Stash is free to use on any supported Kubernetes engine and a 30-day free trial is offered.

• AppsCode is headquartered in the USA and serves a growing number of customers in cloud-native environments.

CloudCasa is a Kubernetes backup solution that is compatible with various distributions, including OpenShift and Rancher, and managed cloud services like AKS, EKS, and GKE.

Who it’s for: Teams looking for a reliable and easy-to-use Kubernetes backup solution that is designed for varied Kubernetes environments and disaster recovery scenarios.

Benefits: CloudCasa is a SaaS solution that requires no new infrastructure for installation and offers multi-cluster, multi-region, and multi-cloud support.

• The platform provides flexibility with both SaaS and self-hosted options.
• Users can catalog, manage, and monitor all their Velero backups from a single, user-friendly console.
• Guided recovery simplifies the backup process.
• CloudCasa offers a free plan for managing Velero backups for up to 15 nodes, making it accessible for smaller setups.

The bottom line: CloudCasa offers secure customer service support via chat, email, and Slack. The solution is also open-source compatible and ensures application-consistent backup across databases with a variety of recovery points to choose from. CloudCasa provides businesses with an efficient and reliable backup solution for their Kubernetes applications.

• CloudCasa is a cybersecurity-focused backup solution headquartered in the USA, designed to streamline Kubernetes backup processes across diverse systems.

LINSTOR is an open-source software that manages block storage devices for large Linux server clusters. The enterprise subscription, LINBIT SDS, includes DRBD, LINSTOR, and expert support, making it ideal for environments like Kubernetes, OpenStack, OpenNebula, and OpenShift.

Who it’s for: Teams looking for open source block storage management in complex, multi-platform environments such as Kubernetes and OpenStack.

Benefits: LINSTOR supports multi-tier storage and geo-clustering, as well as offering high performance through its shared-nothing cluster architecture.

• Multi-tier storage support allows administrators to manage various storage classes within a single cluster, optimizing storage resources.
• Geo-clustering provides data availability across multiple geographic locations, enhancing disaster recovery capabilities.
• Automatic recovery ensures data durability and operational continuity through automated failover and recovery mechanisms.
• LINSTOR facilitates instantaneous, consistent snapshots and clones, simplifying backup and data replication tasks.

The bottom line: LINSTOR SDS is an open source solution with a strong community of users. It has low CPU and memory consumption demands, in-kernel data replication, and three types of replication (synchronous, asynchronous, and semi-synchronous).

• LINBIT, the company behind LINSTOR, is headquartered in Vienna, Austria, and serves hundreds of customers globally.

Longhorn is an open-source distributed block storage system for Kubernetes. It offers lightweight, reliable, and easy-to-use persistent storage for distributed, stateful applications within Kubernetes clusters.

Who it’s for: IT teams managing Kubernetes clusters who need a cost-effective storage solution with high availability.

Benefits: Longhorn simplifies block storage partitioning and offers replication across multiple nodes and data centers to increase availability.

• Built-in incremental snapshots and backups to secure volume data.
• Cross-cluster disaster recovery ensures business continuity.
• Users can schedule backups of persistent storage volumes, enhancing data protection and minimizing data loss.
• Replicas are thin-provisioned on underlying disks or network storage, optimizing resource usage and ensuring the health and repair of replicas.

The bottom line: Longhorn is a simplified, open source storage solution, ensuring the safety of volume data both in and out of the Kubernetes cluster. It is well suited to large file stores, such as image registry.

• Longhorn was originally developed by Rancher Labs and is widely used by the Kubernetes community.

Portworx Backup is a comprehensive data protection solution for Kubernetes applications. Portworx supports easy backup, disaster recovery, and migration across multiple environments.

Who it’s for: Teams managing Kubernetes applications who require advanced data protection and disaster recovery across diverse environments.

Benefits: Portworx Backup excels with its self-service management, granular container-aware backups, and the ability to migrate stateful apps between different environments.

• Ensures that all application data, configurations, and objects are fully secured across Kubernetes cluster.
• Facilitates easy backup in one environment and restoration in another. This includes seamless migration of applications between cloud, hybrid, or on-premises setups.
• Custom backup policies and role-based access controls with simple point-and-click UI.
• Ensures ransomware protection, disaster recovery and business continuity with zero RPO and swift failovers.

The bottom line: Portworx helps simplify backup and recovery for Kubernetes, with an easy-to-use self-service platform for developers and granular backup and restore functionality, as well as supporting straightforward migrations between clusters, clouds and regions.

• Portworx is headquartered in California. Portworx was acquired by Pure Storage in 2020.

Rook is an open-source, cloud-native storage orchestrator designed for Kubernetes environments. Rook provides self-managing, self-scaling, and self-healing storage services. It leverages Kubernetes Operators to streamline deployment and management tasks for the Ceph distributed storage system.

Who it’s for: Best suited for developers/teams looking to automate deployment, configuration, scaling, migration and resource management tasks,

Benefits: Rook orchestrates Ceph, with a specialized Kubernetes Operator, to automate storage management. It supports hyper-scaling and efficient data distribution with minimal loss.

• Simplified automated storage management helps to ease the deployment and management tasks by automating processes for administrators.
• Hyper-scaling capabilities enhancing flexibility and performance in large-scale production environments.
• Multi-type storage provisioning supports file, block, and object storage, catering to diverse storage needs within a cloud-native infrastructure.

The bottom line: Rook is an open-source cloud-native storage platform for Kubernetes. It has hundreds of contributors and has millions of downloads and is used in production across multiple industries.

• Rook is an open-source project under the Apache 2.0 license, widely adaptable for various organizational needs.

Trilio for Kubernetes is a disaster and ransomware recovery solution that supports fast backup and recovery for containers and VMs on Kubernetes distributions. It supports application mobility across on-prem and public cloud clusters.

Who it’s for: Developers looking for an easy-to-install, automated backup and recovery solution, supporting data protection for all Kubernetes distributions. Trilio supports on-prem to cloud migration use cases.

Benefits: The solution is agentless, requiring no application modifications, and offers flexible, configurable recovery options.

• Trilio captures comprehensive backups of stateless and stateful applications, VMs, and PVCs, ensuring all recovery components are included.
• Users can backup and restore using a UI or Kubernetes CLI, making it flexible and user-friendly, helping to facilitate self-service recovery.
• Supports flexible recovery; you can select components of your deployments to recover on any cluster.
• The platform facilitates workload migration between on-prem infrastructure and public cloud environments like Google GKE or AWS.

The bottom line: Trilio for Kubernetes is a powerful service that provides robust recovery solutions for Kubernetes. It’s a scalable, customizable, and automated product that assists in data migration, protects against ransomware, and automates the backup and recovery process.

• Trilio, headquartered in Massachusetts, serves a wide range of customers in various industries.

Veeam Kasten is a cloud-native, Kubernetes data protection platform that provides seamless backup, restore, disaster recovery, and application mobility in enterprise Kubernetes environments.

Who it’s for: Enterprise operations teams managing complex Kubernetes environments looking for a scalable, secure, and easy-to-use data protection platform.

Benefits: The platform stands out for its robust integration capabilities with multi-cloud and multi-cluster environments and its application-centric data protection approach.

• Automatically discovers applications and artifacts, allowing comprehensive protection without manual intervention.
• Users can implement custom and default policies for streamlined backup, ensuring consistent data protection across environments.
• It provides granular restoration controls including data-only restore for running applications, ensuring minimal downtime during recovery.
• Enables ransomware protection, Kubernetes-native RBAC, encryption with KMS, and least-privileged access, enhancing overall data security.

The bottom line: Veeam delivers a wealth of security features that include ransomware protection, Kubernetes-native RBAC, authentication, least-privileged access, and encryption with KMS. It focuses on application-centric data protection, automatically scanning the environment to discover all applications and associated artifacts.

• Veeam is headquartered in Seattle WA and serves over 400,000 customers globally.

Velero is an open-source tool designed to backup, recover, and migrate Kubernetes clusters and persistent volumes.

Who it’s for: DevOps teams and platform operators looking for disaster recovery, data migration and data protection for Kubernetes resources.

Benefits: Valero is an open-source tool with community support. It’s API-driven integration options make it easy-to-manage and user-friendly.

• Provides robust backup and restore functions for Kubernetes clusters, ensuring business continuity.
• Leverages the Kubernetes API, offering flexibility in managing resources.
• Users can schedule recurring backups and trigger ad-hoc backups as needed.
• It supports backup and restoration of all objects in a cluster or filtered by type, namespace, or label.
• Empowers users to back up an entire cluster or specific portions, setting schedules for recurring backups, and configuring pre and post-backup hooks.

The bottom line: Velero is an open source tool that helps teams to safely backup, restore and migrate

• Kubernetes resources has an active community with bi-weekly community meetings, and is backed by VMWare.