The Veeam Kasten data management platform is tailor-made for Kubernetes, offering enterprise teams a scalable, secure, and intuitive system for backing up, restoring, and recovering Kubernetes applications. Kasten's application-centric approach, deeply integrated with databases, Kubernetes distributions, and cloud environments, streamlines operations without constraining infrastructure choices. Supporting native Kubernetes APIs, it features robust consistency, automatic application discovery, multi-cloud mobility, and a sophisticated web interface, all within a policy-driven, flexible architecture.
Veeam Kasten delivers comprehensive features to simplify your Kubernetes data protection. It enables native backup and recovery for stateful Kubernetes applications using Kubernetes APIs, eliminating the need for intermediary storage layers. With support for on-premises environments and cloud platforms like GKE, AKS, and EKS, Kasten provides users with seamless protection across hybrid and multi-cloud deployments. Disaster recovery and failover capabilities ensure business continuity for containerized applications, all while policy-driven automation simplifies backup, recovery, and DR workflows.
What makes Veeam Kasten unique?
Kubernetes Native
Purpose-built, Kubernetes-native approach for data-consistent protection & restoration of applications
Application Centricity: Applications are Kasten's operational unit. It automatically scans the environment, discovering all applications and associated artifacts to protect any changes to the environment.
It provides built-in compliance monitoring to update the protection status of all applications. Finally, it abstracts underlying infrastructure and performs coordinated operations.
Security Everywhere
Veeam Kasten offers security everywhere through features like immutability, industry-standard encryption, key management, authentication, Kubernetes-native RBAC (Role-Based Access Control), and comprehensive auditing, ensuring robust protection for data and applications across all environments.
Ease of Use
Veeam Kasten offers exceptional ease of use with scalable, multi-cluster management and intelligent, policy-based automation via an intuitive UI or API.
Users can create custom or default policies to meet backup needs, ensuring SLA compliance. Its dashboard and built-in metrics provide clear insights into application protection status and quick corrective actions. With enhanced extensibility, Kasten integrates seamlessly with external tools for monitoring, alerting, and data services, simplifying deployments and operations in Kubernetes environments.
Full Ecosystem Support
Highly extensible across cloud-native stack with a rich ecosystem of supported distributions, infrastructure, data services, and marketplaces
Freedom of Choice: Kasten’s ecosystem focus enables seamless support for storage and data services within and across clusters, regions and cloud, neatly abstracting infrastructure complexity.
Kasten offers an intuitive web UI and kubectl integration for streamlined management. Kasten supports additional auth methods including OIDC, OpenShift OAuth, LDAP(S), and Kubernetes bearer tokens. Real-time monitoring via Prometheus allows proactive issue detection, and the open-source Kanister framework makes application-aware data management possible. These features provide a secure, scalable, and user-friendly approach to protecting Kubernetes workloads.
Exploring Key Features of Kasten
This module will explore Veeam Kasten's essential features and teach you its innovative capabilities. Each feature optimizes your applications' projection, efficiency, and recovery to ensure your Kubernetes environments are resilient and manageable.
Blueprints
Blueprints are predefined templates designed to automate and standardize the execution of data management tasks within your Kubernetes environments. They act like a set of instructions that Kasten follows to perform complex operations such as backups, restores, and other data management operations.
Blueprints define the necessary steps for these tasks, making them essential for maintaining operational consistency. Utilizing Blueprints is pivotal in Kubernetes data management. By automating key data operations, blueprints ensure consistency and reliability.
Blueprints are versatile and can be applied in several key scenarios within Kubernetes data management:
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Automated Backup Workflows: Blueprints can automate the process of taking backups, including the specific actions that should be taken before, during, and after the backup process. This might involve quiescing databases or other applications to ensure data consistency.
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Disaster Recovery: In disaster recovery scenarios, Blueprints can dictate the steps for restoring services and applications to a previous state, ensuring minimal downtime and data loss.
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Complex Deployments: For applications that require specific deployment sequences or configurations, Blueprints can orchestrate these processes, ensuring they are carried out consistently and correctly across different environments or installations.
Transforms
Transforms are utilized to modify application metadata, like Kubernetes manifests, during restore operations. This functionality allows for seamless application adaptation across diverse environments by altering specific parameters to align with the target infrastructure. For example, when migrating an application from one cluster to another, transforms can be used to adjust the StorageClass of Persistent Volume Claims (PVCs) to match the storage configurations of the new environment.
This capability is particularly beneficial in scenarios like disaster recovery, test/development setups, and performance testing, where applications need to be restored or migrated across different clusters or cloud providers such as:
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Cross-Cluster Migration: Facilitates the movement of applications between clusters with varying configurations by modifying resource specifications during restoration.
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Disaster Recovery: This process enables the restoration of applications in alternative environments by adjusting metadata to suit the new infrastructure, ensuring business continuity.
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Test/Development Environments: This allows the cloning of production applications into test or development clusters with necessary modifications, such as changing resource limits or environment variables.
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Cloud Provider Transitions: This role assists in migrating applications across different cloud providers by transforming cloud-specific resources and settings during the restore process.
Kubernetes-Native Capabilities
Kasten was intricately designed to operate within your Kubernetes ecosystems, leveraging Kubernetes APIs and core resources to manage and safeguard applications effectively. This native integration facilitates direct interaction with Kubernetes components, allowing Kasten to enhance data management practices seamlessly within the Kubernetes architecture.
Using these Kubernetes-native capabilities allows Kasten to integrate deeply into the Kubernetes environment, resulting in significant enhancements in resource management. This integration ensures that data protection strategies scale efficiently with the application infrastructure and adapt dynamically to changes within the Kubernetes ecosystem. The ability to automate complex management tasks simplifies operations and enhances the overall resilience and efficiency of applications deployed in Kubernetes.
Kasten utilizes several unique Kubernetes-native features that are essential for learners to understand:
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Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs): Kasten employs CRDs to extend Kubernetes capabilities, allowing for the creation of custom setups tailored to specific data management needs. This enables organizations to define and manage their data protection elements as native Kubernetes objects.
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Operator Patterns: Kasten adopts operator patterns to automate management tasks within Kubernetes. These operators are designed to automatically handle provisioning, scaling, and recovery tasks, mirroring Kubernetes' self-healing and scalable nature.