Kubernetes backup products and 10 key players

Containers – and container orchestration, most commonly via Kubernetes – are changing the way enterprises develop and run applications.

Containerised architectures allow organisations to develop, deploy and decommission applications quickly. Also, containerised applications are more easily portable between the cloud and on-premise systems. For some enterprises, this is their key advantage.

But as enterprises use containerised applications more widely, they are also using them to handle more critical data – and this data needs to be backed up.

One of the arguments in favour of containers has been that no backups are needed, because the architecture is stateless and applications are often designed to have a very short working life (most operate for less than a day). Any stateful components are spun up from the central, key-value store, known as etcd.

This works perfectly well for rapid application development and web-based operations. But as enterprises move containers into the core of operations and potentially use them to replace conventional applications, they need a higher level of protection. This means protecting the etcd database and any data stored in persistent volumes.

“Generally speaking, organisations aren’t backing up Kubernetes with native tools, if they are backing it up at all,” says Brent Ellis, a senior analyst at Forrester. “Many product teams back up the etcd configuration database for their clusters, then they back up the primary storage that the container images are stored in and any persistent volumes references in the yaml files.

“This is fine if you have a low degree of complexity and Kubernetes applications that have zero or minimal state. You need application awareness in order to back up an application’s state – and capture where in a particular step of an application that the transformation of data was left off in the case of a disaster.”

This is leading to two main approaches for Kubernetes backup – dedicated products, and broader-based backup and recovery tools that support container environments. This is a, by no means exhaustive, overview of the market.