Kubernetes has emerged as key player in the container orchestration and management sector. Kubernetes (sometimes referred to as K8) fosters agility, is highly scalable, and very effective when it comes to managing containerized applications. As organizations grow and their data increases, the need for a robust backup and storage solution to safeguard their Kubernetes environments becomes essential. Kubernetes backup and storage solutions are engineered to provide streamlined and secure storage, offering comprehensive tools and services to protect data, ensure recovery, and facilitate optimal storage management within Kubernetes platforms.
Kubernetes backup solutions are key elements of a business’s data loss prevention strategy. They offer a myriad of functionalities including automated backups, data recovery, storage optimization, and disaster recovery planning. These solutions are also equipped to handle the complex and dynamic nature of Kubernetes deployments and will ensure seamless data protection and storage management in clustered environments.
With a range of solutions available on the market today, selecting the most suitable Kubernetes backup and storage solution requires careful consideration and planning. We’ve pulled together a list of the top 7 Kubernetes backup and storage solutions to help you find the right solution for your needs. For each solution, we’ll assess the platform’s technological capabilities, ease of use, and overall benefits.
CloudCasa is a Kubernetes backup solution designed for all distributions, including OpenShift and Rancher, as well as managed cloud services such as AKS, EKS, and GKE. As a SaaS backup and restore platform, it requires no new infrastructure to install or maintain. The platform offers multi-cluster, multi-region, and multi-cloud support for users to restore anywhere with ease.
The platform allows users to securely catalog, manage, and monitor all their Velero backups from a single console. With its powerful and user-friendly capabilities, CloudCasa simplifies the backup process, taking care of Velero configuration for users and offering guided recoveries for their backups. With support for all Kubernetes distributions, both on-premises and in the cloud, the platform offers fair pricing, starting with a free plan to manage Velero backups for up to 15 nodes.
Built with cybersecurity resilience in mind, 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.
Kasten K10 is a Kubernetes native data protection platform designed to provide enterprise operations teams with an easy-to-use, scalable, and secure system for backup and restore, disaster recovery, and application mobility. As a solution built specifically for Kubernetes, the platform supports multi-cloud and multi-cluster environments.
Kasten K10 focuses on application-centric data protection, automatically scanning the environment to discover all applications and associated artifacts. It offers policy-driven management, enabling users to set up custom and default policies for backup management. Kasten K10 integrates with a wide range of storage and data services within and across clusters, regions, and clouds, abstracting infrastructure complexity for users.
The platform delivers a wealth of security features that encompass ransomware protection, Kubernetes-native RBAC, authentication, and encryption with KMS. The platform also provides extensive ecosystem support and is compatible with multiple cloud platforms, Kubernetes distributions, and applications. The solution is designed to enable application mobility across cloud and on-premises environments.
LINSTOR is an open-source software designed to manage block storage devices for large Linux server clusters. The enterprise subscription, LINBIT SDS, includes DRBD, LINSTOR, and expert support, making it suitable for providing persistent Linux block storage in Kubernetes, OpenStack, OpenNebula, and OpenShift environments.
One of the platform’s key features is its support for multi-tier storage, geo-clustering, data deduplication, automatic recovery, and data locality. Additionally, LINSTOR offers high performance and scalability through its scaled-out, distributed, and shared-nothing cluster architecture. LINSTOR SDS supports various synchronization methods for data integrity, as well as network redundancy, thin provisioning, and shared block devices. Other features include instantaneous snapshots and clones, cache mechanisms, as well as seamless integration with REST API.
As an open-source software, LINSTOR SDS ensures transparency in development to build trust and a strong community. It has low CPU and memory consumption demands, unmatched in-kernel data replication, and three types of replication (synchronous, asynchronous, and semi-synchronous). The platform is also compatible with multiple platforms, such as OpenShift, OpenNebula, OpenStack, Kubernetes, Docker, Hyper-V, VMware, and Proxmox. Consequently, LINSTOR SDS offers a versatile and efficient solution for managing block storage devices across various environments.
Longhorn is an open-source distributed block storage system for Kubernetes, developed by Rancher Labs. The platform is designed to be lightweight, reliable, and easy to use, providing persistent storage for distributed, stateful applications in a Kubernetes cluster. Longhorn allows for the partitioning of block storage into volumes for use with or without a cloud provider. It offers replication across multiple nodes and data centers to increase availability.
Longhorn simplifies distributed block storage by partitioning storage controllers into smaller units, turning each volume into a microservice called the Longhorn Engine. The Longhorn Manager orchestrates these engines to work together coherently. The platform allows Kubernetes resources to use persistent volumes (PVs) and persistent volume claims (PVCs) for volume-specific configurations across host storage resources. Replicas are thin-provisioned on underlying disks or network storage, increasing availability and ensuring the health and repair of replicas.
Key features include easy incremental snapshots and backups, cross-cluster disaster recovery, and scheduled backups of persistent storage volumes in Kubernetes clusters through Longhorn’s intuitive management UI. This provides a simplified, cost-effective storage solution, ensuring the safety of volume data both in and out of the Kubernetes cluster.
Portworx Backup offers a streamlined data protection solution specifically designed for Kubernetes applications. This managed service simplifies compliance, enables self-service management for application owners, and allows for easy backup and restoration of apps across multiple environments.
The platform provides comprehensive protection through granular container and application-aware backup and restore capabilities. This ensures all application data, configurations, and objects are fully secured across Kubernetes clusters, VMs, and databases. With Portworx Backup, businesses can efficiently migrate applications, including stateful apps, between any cloud, hybrid, or on-premises environment. This enables easy backup in one environment and restoration in another, even for non-Portworx volumes.
For enhanced control, Portworx Backup offers advanced role-based access controls, empowering app owners to set their own backup policies and rules. Additionally, the platform provides ransomware protection and disaster recovery solutions, securing data from attacks and ensuring business continuity with zero RPO and failovers within seconds when paired with PX-DR. The solution package includes single-click app-aware backup and restore, 24/7/365 enterprise support, and upgrades to improve data protection.
Rook is an open-source, cloud-native storage orchestrator that leverages the Kubernetes platform to provide self-managing, self-scaling, and self-healing storage services. It streamlines deployment, bootstrapping, configuration, provisioning, scaling, upgrading, migration, disaster recovery, monitoring, and resource management tasks for storage administrators by using a Kubernetes Operator for Ceph.
Ceph is a distributed storage system offering file, block, and object storage and is widely deployed in large scale production clusters. Rook’s primary purpose is to automate the deployment and management of Ceph, ensuring its seamless integration with cloud-native environments. By utilizing a specialized Kubernetes Operator, it simplifies the deployment and management experience while guaranteeing that Ceph operates effectively on Kubernetes.
Rook offers several features, including simplified and reliable automated storage management, the ability to hyper-scale or hyper-converge storage clusters, efficient data distribution and replication to minimize loss, and provisioning for file, block, and object storage. It allows for the management of open-source Ceph storage, elastic storage in data centers, and workload optimization on commodity hardware. Rook is released under the Apache 2.0 license, ensuring its accessibility and adaptability for various organizations.
Velero is an open-source tool designed to backup, recover, and migrate Kubernetes clusters and persistent volumes for both on-premises and public cloud deployments. It includes a server process that functions as a deployment within the Kubernetes cluster and a command-line interface (CLI) for DevOps teams and platform operators to manage scheduled backups, trigger ad-hoc backups, and execute restores.
Utilizing an API-driven approach, Velero accesses the Kubernetes API to capture the state of cluster resources and restore them when necessary. This method offers numerous benefits including supporting resource subsets and compatibility with managed Kubernetes offerings. It also delivers easy backup and recovery processes for resources exposed through aggregated API servers. Velero users can back up and restore applications’ persistent data in conjunction with their configurations by using their storage platform’s native snapshot capability or integrating with a file-level backup tool like Restic.
Velero empowers users to back up an entire cluster or specific portions, setting schedules for recurring backups, and configuring pre and post-backup hooks. This solution is ideal for disaster recovery and snapshotting application states, Velero proves beneficial for system operations such as cluster upgrades. By utilizing custom resources stored in etcd, Velero supports backup and restoration of all objects in a cluster, or filtered by type, namespace, or label.
Everything You Need To Know About Kubernetes Backup And Storage Solutions (FAQs)
What Are Kubernetes Backup And Storage Solutions?
Kubernetes Backup and Storage solutions provide an effective means of protecting your data (and, by extension, preserving business operations) from data loss. They take regular, comprehensive copies of your Kubernetes data and store it securely. If, for any reason, your Kubernetes data is lost, you can restore it from the last backup at the click of a button. This allows your business operations to continue, meaning that a catastrophic data loss can be resolved relatively simply.
Adopting Kubernetes backup and storage solutions offer several advantages:
- Data Protection: These solutions safeguard data against accidental deletion, corruption, or cyber-attacks, thereby ensuring data integrity and security.
- Business Continuity By enabling data recovery and disaster recovery capabilities, these solutions ensure business continuity even in the face of unforeseen data loss incidents.
- Optimized Storage Management: These solutions facilitate efficient storage management, allowing for scalability and optimization of storage resources according to changing business needs.
- Compliance Adherence: Many of these solutions assist in meeting regulatory compliance by ensuring that data is protected and can be recovered in accordance with mandated guidelines.
How Do Kubernetes Backup And Storage Solutions Work?
Kubernetes Backup and Storage solutions work in a similar way to all backup solutions. They take regular copies of your data, then store this securely, allowing you to restore from a historical backup when needed.
While data-focused backup solutions may offer partial backups in addition to complete ones, when backing up Kubernetes data, complete backups should be used. While these do require more data and time to run, it means that you have comprehensive copies to restore from.
Kubernetes Backup and Storage solutions will save your data to secure locations, usually in public or private clouds, or other off-premises locations. You may choose to have multiple backups stored in multiple locations. This is the most robust data recovery method as it is incredibly unlikely that multiple sites will suffer catastrophic data breaches simultaneously.
What Features Should You Look For In Kubernetes Backup And Storage Solutions?
- Customizable backup intervals and schedules – Depending on the way you work and the amount of data passing through your organization, you may want to configure your solution to fit your specific organization. It may be that you require daily backups, allowing you to restore Kubernetes data that has been collected recently. Alternatively, if your Kubernetes data changes relatively infrequently, weekly backups may be appropriate.
- One-Click Restoration – Your chosen solution should make it easy to restore from saved data. The more streamlined this process is, the more you can reduce downtime after a significant data loss event.
- Compliance – Depending on your sector and geography, there may be expectations placed upon the way you work and the standards you need to meet. Many compliance frameworks require some form of data loss prevention; this type of backup solution can meet those requirements.
- Security – It is important that your stored data is kept secure and safe. A data store can be an enticing target for attackers who could benefit greatly from accessing that information. All data should be encrypted when in transit and when stored; this means that even if an attack can gain access, the data will be meaningless. Being able to enforce privileged user access can further strengthen your security.
