EDITOR ’ S COMMENT
Report . Perhaps highlighting how organisations understand that Kubernetes is not immune to data protection failures .
For the minority who for whatever reason do not back up , however , 26 % believe their container architecture is natively durable and 17 % don ’ t believe they store stateful data . Unfortunately , both of these statements are untrue – regardless of platform , data loss scenarios still take place in Kubernetes which are not addressed by storage availability or replication .
In response , Kubernetes environments require an applicationcentric approach over an infrastructure focus – and organisations need a backup solution that works against a wide range of Kubernetes application stacks and deployment methods . Establishing a container data protection strategy and following backup best practices can be the key to realising this .
Five best practices for backups
In the wake of container maturation , many organisations are proving they don ’ t understand how containers are uniquely designed . Of course , needs and approaches to overcoming this will vary from business to business . But underpinning any effective container data protection strategy is backup solutions , centred on : architecture , recoverability , operations , security and portability .
• Architecture : The platform used to protect Kubernetes applications needs to automatically discover all the application components running on your cluster and treat the application as the unit of atomicity . In addition , it must include the state that spans across storage volumes and databases , as well as configuration data included in objects , such as ConfigMaps and Secrets .
• Recoverability : Data management platforms must allow you to restore the application components you want , where you want them . Granularity is also key to restore only an application subset , such as the data volume . But above all , the approach must make restoring simple and powerful by also allowing you to select the appropriate point of time copy of the application .
• Operations : It ’ s imperative a Kubernetes-native backup platform can be used at scale and provide operations teams with the
A major challenge lies in the fact that because containers by their very nature are designed to be temporary , organisations are realising their lifespans are often shorter than the data they create .
necessary workflow capabilities while meeting compliance and monitoring requirements . Operators should be able to offer self-service capabilities to application developers without requiring application code or deployment changes .
• Security : Controls around identity and access management and rolebased access control ( RBAC ) must be implemented . RBAC permits different personas in an operations team to adopt a least-privilege approach to common tasks , such as monitoring . Encryption at rest and in transit must always be employed to ensure data is secure whenever it has left the compute environment .
• Portability : In a multi-hybrid cloud world , a cloud-native data management platform needs to be flexible in the support of multiple distributions and offer capabilities that allow for the portability of workloads and applications across these diverse environments . Portability capabilities are required across multiple use cases , including application restoring , cloning and migration .
Accelerate your container data protection strategy
By following the above best practices , you ’ ll be well on your way to meeting the backup , restore and mobility requirements of your entire Kubernetes application . But as containers continue to mature , partnering with third-party experts will be the most effective way to address the cloud-native modern data protection needs for enterprises . •
INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS Issue 46 17