Today, we’re not going to talk about why you should protect your data. Because you know you should. In this article, we’ll discuss the different data backup options available, and the ideal software, skills and storage package for you.

In this article, we’ll discuss the different data backup options available, and the ideal software, skills and storage package for you.

Introduction

In the backup world, we can identify two major non-exclusive options for running backups:
Enterprise Backup Solutions and Specialised Backup.

Enterprise Backup Solutions are software capable of executing multiple backups from different sources to a wide choice of destinations. They usually have a very user-friendly User Interface/Command-Line Interface, powerful scheduling capabilities, a range of flexible features, and come with compliance and certifications. They provide extensive support, with large communities you can rely on in the long term.

On the other hand, some applications and/or databases have their own Specialised Backup mechanism. They’re optimised, efficient and extremely popular due to their high performance and, quite often, they don’t need additional licences. However, very often you need to rely on the application/database administrator to take care of the backups.

To summarise:

• Enterprise Backup Solutions are fairly universal, can easily support a company-wide backup strategy, are user-friendly and can meet detailed pre-requisites.
• Specialised Backups are high performance and low cost which is appealing, but they can be difficult to use within a global backup strategy and administrators require specific knowledge.

As well as the tool used to move data, we must consider that data has a source and a destination. Keeping in mind the 3-2-1 rule (3 copies of your data (your production data and 2 backup copies) on 2 different media (disk and tape for example) with 1 copy off-site for disaster recovery), and the amount of sources in a modern IT system, both the choice of software solution and hardware platform used to store the backups must meet both the Global Backup Strategy and… your budget. There is also 3-2-1-1-0 backup strategy, which is another option. After all, even if the technical possibilities are infinite, the budget isn’t.

Enterprise Backup Solutions

So, let’s look at the most practical choices you can make to protect your precious data, whilst not having to rob a bank or ten. And to be honest, we’re mainly going to be looking at cloud services. Not just because we’re a cloud services company, but because cloud storage makes a lot of sense. We’ll demonstrate why.

There are numerous Enterprise Backup Solutions on the market and some have been around for a while. You’ve probably used one, and you’re probably still using that same one today. Why? Because you developed expertise in it, and you built your backup strategy based on its features and recommendations. And that makes sense. Your staff’s experience and skills should never be discounted when investigating opportunities for expanding your backup strategy for new workloads or changing to a cloud service. But very often, this expertise translates very easily to new systems, thanks to the use of standard vocabulary and similar mechanisms. So changing to a new Enterprise Backup Solution shouldn’t be too frightening, as expertise is rarely lost; but usually expanded.

Today, all Enterprise Backup Software supports cloud backup. Whether it’s from the cloud or to the cloud. And it doesn’t come as a surprise, as a lot of workloads are in the cloud – and backups too.
Remember the 3-2-1 rule? The cloud is particularly good for storing your off-site copy given that there are hosting locations all over the world.

OVHcloud Enterprise Backup Solutions

At OVHcloud, our IaaS products are compatible with all major Enterprise Backup Software, and some, like Veeam and HYCU, are even certified to run on our Enterprise platforms. And we also provide the adequate licences so you don’t have to use yet another provider.

You can pair Veeam/HYCU solutions with nearly any Operating System/application and benefit from advanced integration with VMware and Nutanix hypervisors. They have certified compatibility with Network File System / Common Internet File System /Object Storage and you can even add features to improve security.

It’s slightly outside the scope of this article, but our Managed VMware platform even has a Zerto option, allowing you to add replication to the highly recommended backups.

Our Public Cloud instances can be protected using snapshots and backups. All our Bare Metal servers include an external storage of 500GB which can used for your backup. This storage can be extended by up to 10TB.

Other Enterprise Backup Solutions

If you want more control over your backup strategy, leveraging your expertise and fitting it to your specific requirements, it is possible to build your own backup infrastructure with OVHcloud.

 All the major players in the Enterprise Backup market are compatible and already used by OVHcloud’s customers. To mention but a few: Veeam, HYCU, Datamotive, Nakivo, Veritas Technologies, Scality, CommVault, Rubrik, Acronis and Cohesity.

Open-Source Backup Solutions

And of course, if you’d rather use open-source software, Bacula is a perfectly viable option, or the simple but robust rsync. After all, if you just need to keep a reasonably updated copy of your data somewhere else, the simplest tool can often do the job. There’s many open-source options…

Specialised Backup Solutions

Kubernetes workloads

In the Cloud Native / Public Cloud / PaaS environment, you have access to and compatibility with the main players too:

• Velero
• CloudCasa
• TrilioVault
• Veeam Kasten
• and many others.

Application/Database workloads

But what if you use specific application/database mechanisms?
Given that our promise is to be open, agnostic and reversible, we do not block third party software from interacting with your data. So as long as you have the expertise to install and manage them, you can use them and make the most of our large storage portfolio.

Many solutions integrate a mechanism from, for example, pre-backup and post-backup to launch backup of your databases. Of course, if you use your databases with our VMware by Broadcom and/or Nutanix offer, you can rely on Veeam Enterprise and HYCU.

As specified earlier, all major players in the Enterprise backup Software have modules for database protection: Nakivo, Veritas Technologies, Scality, CommVault, Rubrik, Acronis and Cohesity

OVHcloud PaaS Backup

Our Public Cloud instances can be protected using snapshots and backups and our Managed Kubernetes are compatible with several industry leading backup software such as Velero, Triliovault and CloudCasa.

Here is the recap’ of how our Public Cloud Managed products are protected and your options:

SaaS Backup and Solutions

When we’re talking about cloud and Specialised Backup, we can’t forget to mention the SaaS offers. As much as they’re convenient, affordable and widely available, making sure that your data is safe is not always included in the contract. It’s always worth researching this before committing, or you might discover unsuspected charges for your backup.

At OVHcloud, we have a large portfolio of partners who can help. You can find our complete partners directory here.

For Microsoft Office 365 backup, RG system provides a solution hosted on OVHcloud datacentre.

For Cybercriminality incidences, SI Vital solution maintains access to your vital, uninterrupted data and applications, as well as a secure, professional communications platform. A business continuity solution co-constructed with OVHcloud.

Different Types of Storage For Your Backup

Whether you are using an Enterprise Backup Solution or a Specialised Backup mechanism, you can store the backups on dedicated servers (Bare Metal storage), dedicated storage (NAS/HA, Enterprise File Storage), or the current global preferred choice for backup: Object Storage.

All OVHcloud storage solutions : https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/storage-solutions/

And because a picture is worth a thousand words (and that’s about how many words you’ve read so far in this article):

Object Storage & Cold Archive

Object Storage is particularly well-adapted to backup because:

• data growth is not limited by the underlying hardware
• it’s cost-effective
• it’s pseudo disconnected or fully disconnected in some cases
• it’s application/Operating System agnostic
• it’s friendly to static data
• it works with tapes.

Our Object Storage options are:

• Standard Object Storage: ideal for general backups.
• Performance Object Storage: ideal for critical and large backups as its high performance reduces backup and restore time.
• Cold Archive: ideal for meeting the legal requirement for data conservation and disconnected backup for safety.

Block Storage

Block Storage is still a very attractive option for storing backups because of its predictable performance and safety inherent to direct access to storage and RAID. It is the favoured media for on-premises infrastructure as storage arrays are widely available and distributed across datacentres. This distribution and the potential replication options provided by the storage arrays allow you to keep your data safe without causing you headaches. One caveat to mention is that Block Storage it is mostly reserved for server backup since end users don’t have easy access to centralised Block Storage.

File Storage

If you want to protect your users’ shares/export, File Storage is very convenient and access to the data is not bound to physical connections as is often the case for Block Storage. As long as you have access rights and network connection, using File Storage for backup is easy. Most File Storage also provides snapshots, and even though it can’t be considered a backup solution, it does provide a fast recovery mechanism. Advanced File Storage solutions provide replication and High Availability mechanisms.

Expert & Partner Ecosystem

And if you feel intimidated, our Professional Services, Solution Architect and partners can help you make an educated choice and a solid migration. But what if your data is already in the cloud? How is it protected and how can it be?

Well, the devil is in the detail, and very often, protecting your data is your responsibility, not your provider’s. So never ever assume that because your data is in the cloud, it’s automagically protected in the case of an incident.
What we do at OVHcloud is provide access to snapshots for some of our services. But there’s no Service-Level Agreement associated with these snapshots and they may not respect the 3-2-1 rule, hence are not backups.

• OVHcloud Professional Services
• OVHcloud Partner directory
• OVHcloud ISV directory
• OVHcloud Marketplace

Conclusion

Let’s finish by talking about the ideal global backup service approach for you, encompassing software and storage. The main differentiator is going to be: how much control do you want over your backup? Once you have an inventory of the data you need to backup, the first step is to check compatibility with existing or future Enterprise Backup Solutions. Most of the time, you’ll find several solutions that are able to support your needs and protect a vast majority of your data, even if they’re both on-premise and in the cloud. Having all your data in the same place is of course easier, but it rarely happens.

Then you need to verify which of the Software Solutions you’re considering are suitable for your backup strategy. And this is the perfect time to step back and evaluate. Have you missed anything? Does everything follow industry standards? And finally, who can help you find the best compromise between safety and cost. Ideally, we’ve answered all these questions above, so let’s have a look at what we can offer here:

Orchestration tools like Kubernetes have significantly changed the way applications are developed and deployed. They provide developers with the opportunity to focus fully on creating software, which has enabled containers to revolutionize software development. Today, containers have become key elements for hosting and managing applications, and they continue to gain popularity in the world of technology. Their use has allowed companies to gain efficiency and flexibility in deploying their applications, thus improving their competitiveness in the market.

Kubernetes has become the go-to platform for container orchestration, with more and more organizations using it for their production environments. Kubernetes provides many benefits, but it also introduces new challenges and risks. Indeed, as with any technology, Kubernetes is not immune to disasters, data loss, downtime, or infrastructure failures. Therefore, it is crucial to consider the importance of backup and disaster recovery planning (DRP) for Kubernetes clusters too.

To start with, we’ll explain why backup and DRP are critical for Kubernetes clusters, like any other type of clusters, how to implement a backup and DRP strategy, and some best practices for maintaining a healthy Kubernetes environment. Then, we’ll explore how infrastructure as code (IAC) can facilitate DRP, and why Velero Backup is an ideal tool to protect Kubernetes cluster data.

Why Backup and DRP are Critical for Kubernetes Clusters

Kubernetes clusters are complex systems that consist of multiple components and layers, such as nodes, pods, services, and etc. These components are distributed across different hosts and can be subject to failures or errors, whether caused by hardware or software issues, human errors, or even cyber-attacks. When a component fails, it can result in data loss, downtime, or degraded performance.

To avoid these risks and maintain business continuity, it’s essential to have a backup and DRP plan for your Kubernetes clusters. Here are some reasons why:

1. Data protection: Kubernetes stores critical data, such as application configurations, persistent volumes, and stateful sets, in etcd. Backups ensure that your critical data is protected in case of a failure or outage.
2. Disaster recovery: In case of a disaster or outage, a DRP plan helps you recover your data and applications quickly and minimize downtime.
3. Compliance: Many industries and regulations ( GDPR ) require businesses to have a DRP plan to protect sensitive data and maintain business continuity.
4. Risk management: A backup and DRP plan can help you identify potential risks and vulnerabilities in your Kubernetes environment and proactively mitigate them.

How to Implement a Backup and DRP Strategy for Kubernetes Clusters

Implementing a backup and DRP strategy for Kubernetes clusters involves several steps, including:

1. Define your backup and DRP requirements: Identify your critical data and applications, recovery time objectives (RTOs), recovery point objectives (RPOs), and compliance requirements.
2. Choose a backup and DRP solution: There are many backup and DRP solutions available for Kubernetes, such as Velero, Kubernetes Disaster Recovery (KDR), Kasten and Stash. Choose a solution that meets your requirements and integrates with your OVHcloud environment (i.e. using OVHcloud S3 object storage services ensuring full interoperability and resilience), existing tools and workflows.
3. Configure and test your backup and DRP solution: Set up your backup and DRP solution and test it thoroughly to ensure it meets your RTOs and RPOs. Regularly validate and update your backup and DRP plan as your Kubernetes environment changes.
4. Document and train your team: Make sure your backup and DRP plan are clear and familiar to all, and keep your team trained on how to execute it in case of a disaster or outage. Regularly review and update your plan to reflect changes in your Kubernetes environment or compliance requirements.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to Facilitate DRP

Infrastructure as code (IAC) is a methodology that uses code to automate the provisioning, configuration, and management of infrastructure.

With IAC, you can define your Kubernetes environment as code, using tools such as Terraform, Ansible, or Helm. This code can be version controlled, tested, and audited, making it easier to maintain, replicate, and recover your Kubernetes environment in case of a disaster or outage.

IAC can facilitate DRP by providing a consistent, repeatable, and scalable way to deploy and configure your Kubernetes environment. With IAC, you can easily rebuild your Kubernetes environment from scratch, which is especially important in case of a catastrophic failure.

In the context of a Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP), GitOps can be a particularly useful method for managing Kubernetes infrastructure. Thanks to its consistent, reproducible, and auditable approach, GitOps allows for effective control over changes and deployments in the Kubernetes environment. Additionally, by using continuous deployment practices, GitOps makes it easier to monitor and update the Kubernetes environment, which can be crucial for maintaining service availability in the event of an incident.

In case of a disaster or outage, GitOps allows for the quick recovery of the previous state of the infrastructure by using Git’s version control features. Indeed, all changes made to the infrastructure are versioned and documented, making it easier to restore the previous state. Moreover, the consistency of the infrastructure ensured by GitOps reduces the risk of human error and facilitates collaboration between operational and development teams. Overall, GitOps can be a key element in ensuring business continuity within a DRP.

Advantages of Velero Backup to Protect Kubernetes Cluster Data

Velero is an open-source tool that provides backup and disaster recovery capabilities for Kubernetes clusters. Velero offers several advantages for protecting Kubernetes cluster data, including:

1. Automated backups: Velero allows you to schedule automated backups of your Kubernetes resources and their associated volumes. This means that you don’t have to manually create and manage backups, saving you time and reducing the risk of human error.
2. Customizable backup policies: Velero offers flexible backup policies that enable you to customize your backups to meet your specific needs. For example, you can choose to back up only certain namespaces, labels, or annotations.
3. Incremental backups: Velero performs incremental backups, which means that only the changes made since the last backup are saved. This reduces the backup window and saves storage space.
4. Disaster recovery: Velero provides an easy way to restore your Kubernetes resources and their associated volumes in case of a disaster or outage. You can restore your resources to the same cluster or to a different one, making it easier to switch between different environments.
5. Support for multiple cloud providers: Velero supports several cloud providers, allowing multi-cloud strategy and making it easier to use the same tool for backup and disaster recovery across different environments.
6. Integration with IAC tools: Velero integrates with infrastructure as code (IAC) tools, such as Kubernetes manifests and Helm charts. This means that you can include backup and disaster recovery configurations in your IAC templates, making it easier to manage your backups alongside your infrastructure.

To ensure optimal use of Velero, it is recommended to enable Velero metrics to monitor the status of backups. Using the open-source monitoring tools Prometheus and Grafana, you can create a dedicated Kubernetes backup dashboard to display key metrics such as backup size, backup duration, number of successful and failed backups. These metrics provide useful information about the progress and success of backups, allowing for early detection of any potential issues. In addition, to improve visibility and resolution of backup issues, it is recommended to implement Loki and Promtail to retrieve logs and trigger alerts in case of warnings or errors on backups. This proactive approach helps resolve problems faster and improve the quality of backups. By following these best practices, Velero users can ensure that their backups are reliable and available when needed.

In a nutshell, Velero offers a reliable and flexible way to protect your Kubernetes cluster data, automate backups, and streamline disaster recovery.

Conclusion

Backup and DRP are critical for Kubernetes environments to ensure data protection, disaster recovery, compliance, and risk management. IAC can facilitate DRP by providing a consistent, repeatable, and scalable way to deploy and configure your Kubernetes clusters.

As highlighted above, Velero Backup is for sure a reliable and flexible solution to automate backups and streamline disaster recovery.

But there are various solutions available on the market to protect Kubernetes cluster data, and OVHcloud Managed Kubernetes offer (CNCF software compliant) is compatible with all of them by design – you can find out more in the dedicated content library available here.

If you want to get expert advice and support on this topic, we invite you to reach out to our partner LecPac-Consulting using the following contact details or to our Professional Services team.

Email info@lecpac-consulting.com
Telephone 06 13 02 81 71
Website https://lecpac-consulting.com/contact/

But what is your backup and restore strategy?

It is important to be aware that in the event of failure of your infrastructure other than those related to the engine, you are responsible for your backups and restores.
What scenarios exist for a Kubernetes cluster?
You have the choice, and there is no universal answer to this question, because everything will depend on your strategy and your organization.

In the event of a functional or technical failure, your strategy may be to rebuild everything from your sources, on a freshly created Kubernetes cluster.
This rollback strategy will be even more effective if your organization practices the DevOps principle of “Shift Left”, which implies that your developers are responsible for deployments via a policy based on infra-as-code.
There are potentially a few downsides to this backup/restore method.
Indeed, the life cycle of your resources can cause a difference between the definition of these and their real assignments in the cluster.
The role of Kubernetes is to be able to manage your resources, and transform them as needed depending on the load or third-party events.

Take the example of a Kubernetes API update, your resources will be automatically updated with the new version, but the initial definition of your resource will become obsolete without your intervention.
Another example, if among the Kubernetes ecosystem you use tools such as kyverno or OPA Gatekeeper, you will have discrepancies between the definition of your resources and their deployment, which will complicate the restoration.

Alternatively, you can assign this restore task to people within the Ops role in your organization.
In this case, the approach will be rather “system”, that is to say decorrelated from the business, the restoration strategy will be the restoration to a state at time T of the technical environment, often resulting from an image capture, called a snapshot.
To achieve this result, various tools are now recognized for backing up and restoring your Kubernetes cluster. Some examples:
– Trilio
– Velero
– Stash
Our managed Kubernetes offer today does not offer an integrated backup solution, because, as we have seen, there are too many strategies and organizations.

A few months ago, the company Trilio came to offer us, via a Pull Request (PR) on our public documentation space, a very complete tutorial on the installation of their Triliovault for Kubernetes product on our managed Kubernetes offer.
After some technical discussions on implementation and formatting, we were pleased to add this tutorial to our official documentation:

To summarize very succinctly what Triliovault for Kubernetes offers us, here is a simple diagram.

See the complete Trilio documentation

The tool backs up resources first and makes snapshots of physical volumes. The backed up data is stored in an Object Storage such as S3.
Saved resources can be filtered, by namespaces, services, etc.
The administration of the tool is done either by applying manifest files or via a web console.
If we look at Trilio’s offer, we see that the Triliovault for Kubernetes tool adapts to many cloud platforms: OpenShift/OKD, Rancher (RKE1/RKE2), K3S, EKS, AKS, GKE, TKG, MKE, Digital Ocean and of course OVHcloud.
Ref: Compatibility matrix

We greatly appreciated working together on this PR, as it was done without any commercial or strategic agreements.
For our part, we are committed to offering the best Kubernetes service to our customers, and Trilio to ensuring that this environment is secure.
A fine example of complementarity technologies and alignment of objectives.

The story does not end there, then, because in a week at the time of writing this article, we have the opportunity to meet “in the flesh” at Valencia Spain, on the occasion of the Kubecon Europe 2022.

If you are therefore interested in our respective offers and would like to see a demo, this is the perfect opportunity!