Kubernetes backup is a thing of concern as containerization has rapidly grown. Here we answer some important questions on the topic.
Kubernetes backup is a thing of concern as containerization has rapidly grown across enterprises. A significant portion of the market now uses containers, and most adopters use containers in production. This level of adoption raises questions on how containers are managed, protected and how organizations ensure proper Kubernetes backup.
The Need for Kubernetes Backup
A stateful container, such as in K8s, requires persistent storage, and persistent storage requires backup. Moreover, organizations should recover container clusters from running critical applications. To achieve this, they have to recover their state, data, and info on orchestration. Hence, enterprises pay attention to Kubernetes backup.
It is said that containers exist in a sort of black spot when it comes to backups. The problems might not usually be noticeable to the DevOps backup and recovery specialists who manage them. Furthermore, conventional tools to back up VMs are not ideal for containers.
Now, let us look at some of the most crucial concerns enterprises have with Kubernetes back up and answer them.
1. Is Kubernetes Backup Always Needed for Organizations?
The short answer is yes. Older stateless containers were created to perform tasks and vanish. Even though use cases still exist, enterprise needs are different now. Organizations need strong backup policies that support containers in both development and production. Data protection tools need to recognize the Kubernetes ecosystem and perform accordingly.
2. What is to be protected in Kubernetes?
First and foremost, container users should protect the orchestrated clusters. Failing to preserve orchestration can lead to risks such as not rebuilding applications/projects after any failure.
The enterprise also needs to protect applications, including pods, etcd key value databases, deployments, stateful sets, workloads, persistent volumes, resulting claims, container image registries, custom resource definitions, and namespace definitions.
3. What is an effective backup method?
Kubernetes backup methods can be specialized tools or enterprise applications supportive of the containers or K8s. Conventional backup tools might not make enough copies according to the necessary intervals or span systems to capture all the states in a Kubernetes production environment. Open source tools such as kube-backup export configured Kubernetes resources repositories. The downside is that scaling or dealing with persistent volumes is unlikely in this scenario.