Disaster recovery and data resilience support for Kubernetes workloads has been a hot topic lately, with all the major backup and data resilience vendors scrambling to build more features into their Kubernetes-focused products. My colleague Lee Sustar has been tracking the maturation of Kubernetes and is currently developing advice for enterprises building a full disaster recovery and data resilience strategy for the emerging platform. From a technology point of view, the features added are not groundbreaking, but building ransomware protection in Kubernetes-native data resilience is new. Kasten by Veeam’s native ransomware protection announcement is another signal of how Kubernetes is taking over the enterprise, a development that demands mature resilience and data protection solutions for any application in production.

The Left Shift Continues

Kubernetes is reaching maturity and enabling the shift to cloud-native development and software-defined infrastructure. Product teams should champion “resiliency by design” to plan for data protection needs in an application or service during the initial design phase. Platform-native tools such as Kasten by Veeam support this shift with solutions that meet the needs of product teams and application developers in their native platform. Notably, they avoid the grafting on of data and workload protection by an infrastructure and operations (I&O) team after the project hits production. Decisions about an application’s data protection needs will move left, with traditional I&O departments building enablement platforms and defining service levels and product teams assigning those service levels to applications in code or as part of their continuous integration/continuous delivery tooling.