Kubernetes is important.

The cloud container orchestration technology has formed an all-pervading, arguably widely enduring and almost ubiquitous level of adoption and penetration across the modern web-scale computing landscape that we now all live in.

But Kubernetes is also vulnerable to difficulties due to the operational complexity required to drive it down the highway, especially when that road widens for inevitable enterprise scalability – and, crucially, when it also broadens to straddle the diversity of modern deployment environments.

Aiming to solidify and rectify against some (if not all) of those challenges (Ed: maybe we should call the ‘khallenges’ to continue the K8-theme and thread that comes with Kubernetes?), Kasten by Veeam has tabled its latest Kubernetes backup and disaster recovery technology to market this fall.

The snappily named Kasten by Veeam K10 V5.5 Kubernetes data management platform has arrived with an extra helping of autonomous operations goodness.

Autonomous operations

As Kubernetes-empowered applications grow, the suggestion here is that operations teams with the required skill sets are in short supply. Kasten by Veeam K10 V5.5 claims to be able to bridge this skills gap by introducing new capabilities that center around autonomous operations and cloud-native expansion.

“Organizations need to not only transition to a new, modern cloud-native development technology and workflow but also require operations at scale without having an army of certified Kubernetes administrators,” said Gaurav Rishi, VP of product and partnerships at Kasten by Veeam. “This is where Kasten K10 shines – by scaling simplicity. Our latest release augments an organization’s workforce so that the enterprise can realize cloud-native technology and operational benefits by automating several data management tasks.”

Backing up and protecting Kubernetes environments on top of designing and maintaining cloud-native deployments is widely agreed to be a ‘compounding issue’ for this already short-staffed workforce that we are discussing here.

Optimize & de-risk K8

A recent Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) survey found that the percentage of enterprises investing in Kubernetes and containerization in production continues to grow, making it critical to optimize and de-risk their large Kubernetes investments. 

New capabilities of Kasten K10 V5.5 include intelligent policies. Users can now factor in an application’s non-peak usage hours and specify a backup window accordingly. Kasten K10 will honor the backup windows and further automate the sequencing of the underlying backup jobs. This optimizes the utilization of the underlying infrastructure and automatically handles conflict resolution when multiple policies are scheduled.

Kasten K10 further eases onboarding by providing an intuitive graphical wizard to generate the most suitable install manifests that can be visualized and repeated for multiple installs. 

IPv6 inter-Pod communication

Kasten K10 also features IPv6 support to resolve IP exhaustion problems and address growing edge deployments with support for Amazon EKS with IPv6 inter-Pod communication and GitOps workflow integrations offering scalable workflows for efficient app deployment as well as backup/restore.

“Kubernetes adoption and containerization are increasingly becoming mainstream across enterprises, but current manual steps, constant oversight and ever-present cyberattacks continue to inject complexity in the Kubernetes backup environment, hampering DevOps teams’ ability to scale,” said Danny Allan, CTO and SVP of product strategy at Veeam.

Allan contends that with Kasten by Veeam K10 V5.5, customers can ensure adequate data protection in Kubernetes environments by offering autonomous operations that support cloud-native expansion goals.

“What’s more, Kasten by Veeam’s membership with The Open Source Security Foundation strongly underlines the company’s commitment to contributing to security best practices and education for both Kasten and Veeam customers, as well as the industry at large,” he added.

Users also have access to the most up-to-date advancements across increasing workload types, geographic regions, storage types and security. 

NOTE: Kasten K10 now supports RedHat OpenShift Virtualization that enables users to run and manage Virtual Machine (VM) and container workloads side by side on Red Hat OpenShift. 

General availability of the new Kasten K10 V5.5 is expected later this quarter. 

About Adrian Bridgwater

Adrian Bridgwater is a freelance journalist and corporate content creation specialist focusing on cross platform software application development as well as all related aspects software engineering, project management and technology as a whole. Adrian is a regular writer and blogger with Computer Weekly and others covering the application development landscape to detail the movers, shakers and start-ups that make the industry the vibrant place that it is. His journalistic creed is to bring forward-thinking, impartial, technology editorial to a professional (and hobbyist) software audience around the world. His mission is to objectively inform, educate and challenge - and through this champion better coding capabilities and ultimately better software engineering.