Before we begin, you may need to take a look at the series:
1- Kasten for OKE – Part 1: Preparation
2- Kasten for OKE – Part 2: Installation and Troubleshooting
From this point, I started to play with Kasten, and in this part, I will build my first policy.
I just wanted to recap one important thing here, which is why Kubernetes backup is important. For several reasons:
Data Protection: Kubernetes clusters contain critical application data, configuration files, secrets, and persistent volumes. Without proper backup, you risk losing valuable business data due to hardware failures, human errors, or security incidents.
Application State Recovery: Modern applications often maintain complex states across multiple components. A comprehensive backup ensures you can restore not just the data but also the entire application configuration and dependencies.
Disaster Recovery: Backups enable you to quickly restore services and minimize downtime in case of cluster failures, ransomware attacks, or infrastructure outages.
Compliance Requirements: Many industries require data retention and recovery capabilities for regulatory compliance. Kubernetes backups help meet these obligations.
Migration and Portability: Backups facilitate moving applications between clusters, cloud providers, or environments while preserving their complete state.
Rollback Capabilities: When updates or deployments go wrong, backups provide a reliable way to revert to previous working states.
Just a hint: when I started to use K10 today, I found this alert message:
Upgrade available as I used version 7.5.9 during my setup. To upgrade to the latest Veeam Kasten release, unless you have installed Veeam Kasten via a public cloud marketplace, you should run the following command, assuming you installed in the kasten-io namespace with the release name k10. If you do not remember your release name, you can easily discover that via the use of helm list --namespace=kasten-io.
$ helm repo update && \
helm get values k10 --output yaml --namespace=kasten-io > k10_val.yaml && \
helm upgrade k10 kasten/k10 --namespace=kasten-io -f k10_val.yamlKnown Issues: Helm 3 has known bugs with upgrade (e.g., #6850). If you run into errors along the lines of
Error: UPGRADE FAILED: rendered manifests contain a new resource that already exists. Unable to continue with update: existing resource conflict: kind: Deployment, namespace: kasten-io, name: prometheus-serverPlease use the following as a workaround and then run the above upgrade commands.
$ kubectl --namespace=kasten-io delete deployment prometheus-serverYou can see all upgrade options from here.
Now, just a refresh and we are good to go.
Let’s start with the first policy
From the applications section, I can now see all applications inside my K8 cluster.
Select the application, and click on the three vertical dots. you will see multiple options.
I chose to create a policy
I noticed in this section that there are two options: Snapshot and Import. In Kasten, snapshots are point-in-time copies of data within a Kubernetes cluster used for quick recovery, while imports involve restoring data from a previously exported backup into a different cluster or location, enabling application mobility and disaster recovery.
Some other options:
And advanced settings:
The policy is ready
I wanted to try it. So, I clicked on “Run Once”. It is now working:
The restore point is now here, and you can choose between restore, export, or delete.
What’s next
This is the basic task for Kasten, but it is not limited to that. Still, there are many other options that I need to dig into in the next parts. Stay tuned.
Former Nuclear Engineer | University Lecturer | Technology Advisor | Digital Transformation evangelist | FinTech | Blockchain | Podcaster | vExpert ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ | VeeamVanguard ⭐️⭐️ | Nutanix SME | MBA | AWS ABW Grant’23
