CloudCasa is the Kubernetes backup business of Catalogic that’s heading for a spin-out. Its cloud-native product integrates with Kubernetes engines on AWS, Azure, and GCP, and can see all the K8s clusters running through these engines. Velero provides snapshot-based backup for Kubernetes stateful containers and can run in a cloud provider or on-premises. CloudCasa supports Velero and provides a paid-for support package.

COO Sathya Sankaran told us the Velero stats imply “at least a million clusters are downloading.”

He says he had a conversation with a VMware product manager at KubeCon who told him that “they estimate about one-third of all Kubernetes clusters have been touched by Velero and at some point have had Velero installed and running …  it’s a very substantial market presence.”

Sankaran added: “This is already a community ecosystem, driven very strongly by what the rest of the community thinks is good or bad.

We have asked business rivals Veeam, Pure, and Trilio what they think.

Sankaran says CloudCasa for Velero is the only Kubernetes Backup-as-a-Service offering with integration across multiple public clouds and portability between them. It offers a swathe of extra features over the base Velero provision (think Red Hat and Linux.

Sankaran says: “Velero wants to become the Kubernetes backup standard. The commercial backup products are pre-packaged… Velero wants to be a plug-in engine, useable by new storage products as well as the historic incumbents.”

The exec’s hope is that CloudCasa can overtake rivals Kasten, Portworx, and Trilio by riding what he sees as a wave of Velero adoption, particularly in the enterprise, by offering them a multi-cluster and anti-lock-in offering. K8s app protection is different from traditional backup, says Sankaran, who claims layering it on to legacy backup is the wrong approach.