As we head into 2021 and beyond, the application development and deployment paradigm is changing drastically as businesses undergo a digital transformation. Chances are you are now building and deploying the next-generation applications to meet the rapidly changing business environment, to add greater value to your customers, and to adapt to the new “normal” with the COVID-19 pandemic.
When selecting the next set of application infrastructure, the following considerations are paramount:
These are the reasons why many companies are adopting Kubernetes and containers to build their new cutting-edge applications.
The software community has been looking for a platform to enable fast application development and flexible deployment. With Kubernetes, that search is over. Containerization along with Kubernetes orchestration is an app developer’s dream come true. Developers don’t need to worry if the application runs on-premises or within public clouds. Nor do they need to worry about deployment while building business logic. It makes the life of developers much easier when it comes to developing new applications faster and better.
In the last 20 years, computing has evolved from physical servers to virtual machines to containers. Containers are essentially stripped down versions of the Linux Operating System. A container is not a VM, and they typically run a single process. Container images are immutable, which prevents infrastructure drift.
Developed first by Google, Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for containers that has become the de-facto standard for container orchestration.
Container orchestration involves handling deployment, scaling, load balancing, service registry, application configuration, monitoring, routing, etc. It helps:
Kubernetes provides the ability to orchestrate the application lifecycle in a simple and powerful way that can provide developers with the ability to focus on business logic while the ops teams manage the application runs. This provides great value to an IT organization today in building and running business critical applications more effectively.
Docker and Kubernetes are great, but how do you provide governance, ensure compliance, and provide the resiliency that enterprises need for their business applications? Customers have the following goals with any business application:
All of the above are as critical when it comes to new applications built using the microservices architecture. All the use cases — Backup and Recovery, Disaster Recovery, Dev/Test, Migration, Protection from Ransomware, etc.— are very much relevant for these new containerized applications just as they are for applications running within hypervisors.
At the advent of containers, users were primarily using containers in a stateless manner. As adoption grew, Kubernetes clusters started using stateful containers. Containers have two types of data:
A stateful container has both business data and metadata, whereas a stateless container has only metadata. Metadata can be extremely important as well and needs protection too. Metadata controls how the container deploys, how it scales, what attributes it uses, what keys it uses, and so on. Metadata is critical for reinstating the application and is equally important to protect against engineered or natural disasters. Metadata is needed for true application recovery.
A backup and recovery solution for a Kubernetes application needs to consider the following:
Cohesity provides enterprises with the ability to protect their new Kubernetes-based applications as part of Cohesity DataProtect, a software-defined backup and recovery service. Cohesity DataProtect provides enterprises the same level of resiliency and flexibility to Kubernetes-based applications as it does to other business-critical workloads. Cohesity provides backup and recovery leveraging CSI (container storage integration) snapshots. Cohesity PODs (a deployment object in Kubernetes that contains one or more containers) are deployed on each worker node of the Kubernetes cluster for better performance. It provides powerful policy-driven auto-protection, deduplication, replication, and archival of data for backup and disaster recovery purposes. We support a range of distributions including Openshift and VMware Tanzu for backup and recovery.
With Cohesity, customers are assured that their newest applications are fully protected and compliant. Learn more about how you can protect your business-critical Kubernetes-based application with Cohesity.
For more information on what you need to know about containers from leveraging to protection, join this on-demand webcast, How Containerized Apps Break the Mold — And What You Should Know to Protect Them, with a panel of experts from Fixate IO, Red Hat, and Cohesity.