The Top 10 Kubernetes Backup And Storage Solutions

AppsCode is a Kubernetes-native data platform that encompasses database lifecycle management, secrets and user management, ingress control, cluster management, and backup and recovery. Stash is the platform’s native disaster recovery solution; it enables users to backup and restore their volumes and databases in Kubernetes on any public or private cloud.

Stash offers a Kubernetes-native approach to data backup and restoration through a declarative API using Custom Resource Definitions (CRD), which allows users to schedule backups similarly to how they deploy workloads. It supports the backup of Kubernetes volumes across various workloads such as Deployment, DaemonSet, StatefulSet, and more, including stand-alone PVCs with “ReadWriteMany” access mode. Stash also facilitates the backup of databases like MariaDB, Redis, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Percona XtraDB, and Etcd, integrating seamlessly with KubeDB. It supports multiple storage services, including AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob Storage, and more, as well as Kubernetes persistent volumes.

With features like deduplication, Stash uploads only modified data segments, ensuring efficient storage use. The platform ensures security with AES-256 encryption, and the VolumeSnapshot API automates volume snapshots. Finally, the platform offers policy-based backups and native Prometheus monitoring support, with integration into Grafana for operational metrics visualization.

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 cloud-native backup and restore platform, it requires no new infrastructure to install or maintain. The platform offers SaaS and self-hosted versions, and 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.

LINSTOR is a scalable, 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.

The platform’s key features include 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 is a versatile, efficient, and highly customizable 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, yet high availability 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 high-availability managed service simplifies compliance, enables self-service management for application owners, and allows for easy backup and disaster recovery 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.

Trilio for Kubernetes is a disaster and ransomware recovery solution designed specifically to backup and restore applications and VMs deployed on Kubernetes distributions. It oversees the backup of application containers and virtual machines, enhancing application mobility across any cluster, whether it’s on-prem or in a public cloud.

The Trilio solution uses Operator Hub or Helm for installation and runs as pods, without requiring alterations to applications, making it agentless. It captures snapshots of stateless and stateful applications, as well as PVCs, including VMs. The service extends standard Kubernetes features by utilizing Custom Resource Definitions, eliminating the need for a separate CLI tool. The solution provides a self-service feature, allowing backup and restoration of Helm, label deployments, operators, and VMs using UI or Kubernetes CLI. Once backed up, the platform offers configurable recovery options: users can select components of application deployments to recover on any Kubernetes cluster.

Trilio for Kubernetes tailors its backups to ensure that everything necessary to recover your app and virtual machines is backed up; this includes Helm Applications, Label based Deployments, Operators, Virtual Machines, Persistent Volumes, Container Image Repository, and Metadata. Trilio also provides great utility in migrating workloads from in-house infrastructure to public cloud atmospheres such as Google GKE or Red Hat OpenShift on AWS.

Overall, Trilio for Kubernetes is a powerful service that provides robust recovery solutions for Kubernetes, without the user having to add sidecars or modifications to their applications. It’s a scalable, customizable, and automated product that assists in data migration, protects against ransomware, and eases the recovery process after a catastrophe, making it a valuable tool for any Kubernetes-based system.

Veeam Kasten is a cloud-native, 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.

Veeam Kasten 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. Veeam Kasten integrates with a wide range of storage and data services within and across clusters, regions, and clouds, abstracting infrastructure complexity for users. It also enables users to manage VMs on Kubernetes without refactoring the entire application.

In terms of backup and recovery, it offers granular restoration controls, including data-only restore for running applications, and automated disaster recovery, which automatically recreates the entire application stack in the event of a data loss disaster. The platform also delivers a wealth of security features that include ransomware protection, Kubernetes-native RBAC, authentication, least-privileged access, and encryption with KMS.

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. The platform specializes in disaster recovery and the ability to ensure continuity in the event of infrastructure loss, data corruption, and/or service outages. 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.

Afi.ai is a Kubernetes (K8s) backup solution designed to provide extensive, automated protection for all K8s cloud services and distributions. The solution accommodates cross-cluster and cross-cloud restore and migration features, all managed from a unified user interface. Afi.ai utilizes full-fidelity backup to protect K8s applications, infrastructure, and data. It can also conduct Google-like full-text search across all backups for easy recovery.

Afi.ai allows organizations to ensure resilient, zero-maintenance protection. By auto-discovering resources and automatically configuring protection settings, Afi.ai streamlines backup and recovery processes. It has the capacity to recover complex applications with thousands of nodes and petabytes of data in a single click, without the need to manually deploy and maintain backup and recovery scripts. In addition, Afi.ai houses a unique AI-powered security engine, built to prevent data loss during cyber-attacks. It can also detect vulnerabilities in cluster configurations and application dependencies.

The platform caters to various user roles, seniority levels, and geographic locations due to granular access control and data residency policies. It also integrates with leading IAM providers, including Azure AD, GCP, AWS, and Okta. All of these operate in compliance with data privacy regulations. In addition, Afi.ai allows convenient integration with popular DevOps systems like Terraform, Circle CI, and Jenkins. Through these comprehensive features, Afi.ai can effectively facilitate automated disaster recovery processes.

Overall, Afi.ai offers a comprehensive, fully automated Kubernetes backup solution that combines extensive protection features, an AI-powered security engine, and granular access control. It supports seamless integration with DevOps systems and promotes streamlined, efficient backup administration. Finally, this is also a cost-effective solution, as users need only license the nodes they protect, and don’t need to pay for storage if they have their own storage facilities.