We discussed in previous blogs the need for data protection for Kubernetes and what’s different about CloudCasa. CloudCasa was designed to address the gap in data protection and disaster recovery that exists in all the leading Kubernetes distributions and managed cloud services. Further, another pain point that CloudCasa addresses is that your cloud-based applications may well be hybrid and multi-cloud applications that use both container-based storage and serverless databases. This is not unlike your on-premises applications that run in different server, virtualization, and storage infrastructures. CloudCasa was designed to support hybrid, distributed, multi-cluster, and multi-cloud environments.
One of our early beta users challenged us on why CloudCasa was needed when there is already backup for a Kubernetes cluster available in Azure. Indeed, Azure’s best practices guide for storage and backups in Azure Kubernetes Service states: Back up your data using an appropriate tool for your storage type, such as Velero or Azure Backup.
The Azure Backup service is a file and VM-level backup that is not container or cluster aware, so it is not suitable for recovering cluster configuration and application state. While Azure Backup does support all of Azure’s databases, CloudCasa will also support these and the serverless databases of other cloud services.
Velero is an open source, CLI-based tool that needs infrastructure to be provisioned and supported for it. Then you need to manually setup and configure it for each cluster you have, including the backup storage target for each cluster.
Top 10 Reasons for Using CloudCasa instead of Velero
Since CloudCasa actually leverages Velero for some of its data protection capabilities, let’s go through the major additions we have added, based on our 25+ years of experience in the data protection market.
1. Backup as a service. With CloudCasa, there is no need to build a backup infrastructure or maintain Velero installations with fast evolving updates. We host and manage your backups and snapshots with a rich service so complete with capabilities that even your IT Operations team would use it. Set it and forget it and you’ll never need to hear this:
2. Intuitive UI:Get ease of configuration and management from an intuitive GUI that guides you through initial setup of policy driven data protection for your clusters and namespaces. Within 10 clicks you’ll have your backup and restore policies and operations in place. And we all know
3. Multi-Cluster Management: Multi-cluster, hybrid, and multi-cloud management, with cluster migration. The challenge of manually dealing with Velero on a dozen clusters is very different from dealing with Velero on one cluster.
4. Free Backup Storage: Free storage for your cluster resource data is included in the CloudCasa service. We configure and manage the storage leaving no room for misconfiguration of bucket permissions that can expose your data. Don’t let your backups go to a file share or a bucket that can be hacked or that everyone has access to.
5. Secure Backups: Data is encrypted in flight and at rest by CloudCasa. Don’t leave security to chance and hope your Kubernetes backup owners are setting the right privileges. CloudCasa is also adding support for BYO keys as well, for both data in transit and data at rest.
6. Account Compromise Protection: If your cloud account gets compromised, you could lose primary and secondary data to a malicious user or to a ransomware attack. CloudCasa provides separation for your data and you don’t end up with all your eggs in one basket.
7. Cloud Provider Outage Protection: CloudCasa protects against local and temporary outages of your cloud provider by allowing you to quickly restore in an alternate zone or region or to an alternate cloud provider. Each quarter based on customer demand, we’ll add support for even more regions and cloud providers.
8. Serverless Data Protection: CloudCasa will support snapshotting serverless databases to ensure application consistent backups of data outside of Kubernetes. Serverless databases account for a large portion of persistent data for applications running on Kubernetes.
9. Centralized Catalog and Reporting: You don’t have to pray and hope that you have a backup when you need it. From the CloudCasa console, you can quickly scan your cloud native application environment for recovery points and always be aware of how protected and compliant you are.
10. Backups are Monitored: We monitor backup success rates across customers, debug your problems, and proactively inform you when you could do something to improve your success rates.
