The GreyBeards have been discussing K8s storage services a lot over the last year or so and it was time to understand how container apps and data could be protected. Recently, we saw an article about a Veritas funded survey, discussing the need for data protection in K8s. As such, it seemed a good time to have a talk with Reneé Carlisle (@VeritasTechLLC), Staff Product Manager for NetBackup (K8S), Veritas.
It turns out that Veritas NetBackup (NBU) has just released their 2nd version of K8s data protection. It’s gone completely (K8s) native. That is, Veritas have completely re-implemented all 3 tiers of NBU as K8s micro services. Moreover, the new release still supports all other NBU infrastructure implementations, such as bare metal or VM NBU primary server/media server services. It’s almost like you have all the data protection offered by NBU for the enterprise over the years, now also available for K8s container apps. Listen to the podcast to learn more.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 48:22 — 66.4MB) | Embed
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Email | RSS
To make use of NBU K8s, backup admins establish named gold, silver, bronze backup policies selecting frequency of backups, retention periods, backup storage, etc. Then DevOps would tag a namespace, pods, containers, or PVs with those data protection policy names. Once this is done, NBU K8S will start protecting that namespace, pod, container, or PV.
In addition, backup admins can include or exclude specific K8s namespace(s), pod(s), container(s), labels (tags), or PVs to be backed up with a specific policy. When that policy is triggered it will go out into the cluster to see if those K8s elements are active and start protecting them or excluding them from protection as requested.
NBU K8s has an Operator service, Data Mover services and other micro services that execute in the cluster. That is, at least one Operator service must be deployed in the cluster (recommended to be in a separate namespace but this is optional). The Operator service is the control plane for NBU K8S services. It will spin up data movers when needed and spin them down when done.
The Operator service supports a CLI but more importantly to DevOps, a complete implemented RESTful API service. Turns out the CLI is implemented ontop of the NBU (Operator) API. With the NBU API DevOps CI/CD tools or other automation can perform all the data protection services to protect K8s.
One historical issue with backup processing is that it can consume every ounce of network/storage and sometimes compute power in an environment. The enterprise class data movers (or maybe the Operator control plane) has various mechanisms to constrain or limit NBU K8S resource consumption so that this doesn’t become a problem.
But as the Operator and its Data Mover are just micro services, if there’s need for more throughput, more can be spun up or if there’s a need to reduce bandwidth, some of them can be spun down, all with no manual intervention whatsoever.
Furthermore, NBU K8s can be used to restore/recover PVs, containers, applications or namespaces to other, CNCF compliant K8s infrastructure. So, if you wanted to say, move your K8s namespace from AKS to GKE or onprem to RedHat OpenShift, it becomes a simple matter of moving the last NBU backup to the target environment, deploying NBU K8s in that environment and restoring the namespace.
NBU K8s can also operate in the cloud just as well as on prem and works in any CNCF compatible K8s environment which includes AKS, EKS, GKE, VMware Tanzu and OpenShift.
In the latest NBU K8s they implemented new, enterprise class Data Movers as micro services in order to more efficiently protect and recover K8S resources. Enterprise class Data Movers can perform virus-scanning/ransomware detection, encryption, data compression, and other services that enterprise customers have come to expect from NBU data protection.
NBU K8S accesses PV data, container, pod and namespace data and metadata using standard CSI storage provider and normal K8s API services.
As mentioned earlier, in the latest iteration of NBU K8s, they have completely implemented their NBU infrastructure, natively as containers. That adds, K8s auto-scaling, full CI/CD automation via APIs, to all the rest of NBU infrastructure operating completely in the K8s cluster.
So, now backup admins can run NBU completely in K8s or run just the Operator and its data mover services connecting to other NBU infrastructure (primary server and media servers) executing elsewhere in the data center.
NBU K8s supports all the various, disk, dedicated backup appliances, object/cloud storage or other backup media options that NBU uses. So that means you can store your K8s backup data on the cloud, in secondary storage appliances, or anyplace else that’s supported by NBU.
Licensing for NBU K8s follows the currently available Veritas licensing such as front end TB protected, subscription and term licensing options are available.
Reneé Carlisle, Staff Product Manager, Veritas NetBackup (K8S)
Reneé (LinkedIn) has been with Veritas Technologies for eleven years in various focus areas within the NetBackup Product Management Team. In her current role she is the Product Manager responsible for the NetBackup strategic direction of Modern Platforms including Kubernetes and OpenStack. She has a significant technical background into many of the NetBackup features including Kubernetes, virtualization, Accelerator, and cloud.
Prior to working for Veritas, she was a customer running a large-scale NetBackup operation as well as a partner implementing, designing, and integrating NetBackup in many different companies.