Jeff Ligon – Backing Up Your K8s Strategy: The Facts and Myths

Hello everyone. My name is Jeff Ligon. I'm a senior solution architect at trillio.

Trilio is a cloud native backup recovery and data protection solution for kubernetes. And today. I want to talk to you about backing up your kubernetes strategy the facts and the myths.

So first, let's set the landscape for the kubernetes of today as everyone knows, you know, you've probably seen this massive Trend that's this massive shift that's going on in the IT industry. To migrate monolithic applications to microservices and you've probably kind of heard the term that kubernetes has won the war on on container orchestration. And so there's a a quote here that we've seen from IDC saying that by the year 2024 that net new production grade Cloud native applications will increase to 70% and that's over 10% and 2020.

So a massive increase in the move to Containers container orchestration and kubernetes. So with this move, let's talk about some of the challenges, you know, one of those the biggest challenges in any it environment is downtime. And as we all know downtime cost time and money.

So these are some statistics that we've pulled from Gardener that says that each minute of downtime of an average business cost fifty six hundred dollars per minute and another quote that 91% of the organizations say that just one hour of downtime would cost more than 300,000. And some of the cause of some of this downtime recently has been the rise and ransomware attacks and the ransomware downtime, especially when if you include the companies that pay for the ransom that the numbers just just go up from there. You know, but then there's another Gardener also mentions that it's not just about the money.

They're you know, there's another side. To downtime and that's the the time lost by these it organizations. So I was just at an IT conference this week a tech talk conference or a company there was talking about it keeping up with the pace of business and you know, the challenges with doing that and and downtime, you know the time that somebody spends working on a problem or working on downtime is time that that it engineer is taking away from some other productive work that he could be doing.

You know, I think we've all heard anecdotes from from friends and and on it teams that say something along the lines of I feel like I'm just Treading Water, you know, I'm just trying to keep up with with all of the tickets that come in and all the problems that lead to downtime and so that you know that's keeping these it Engineers from working on more meaningful projects to improve or grow their business. So we all know that the downtime is bad downtime is costly. You know, how do we reduce this as much as possible in our it Industries?

And so when we're going to to kubernetes The answer is is that you need to have a good backup strategy for your kubernetes environment. So here at Trillium. We've been helping doing companies do that for several years now.

And so what we wanted to do today is talk about three myths common myths that we hear from a large range of customers and have a discussion about these myths And so let's get right into myth. Number one. I don't need backup because all kubernetes applications are stateless.

So we heard that a lot. I heard that a lot. I went to the kubecon trade show last October in Los Angeles and at that time that was a three day event and I spoke to a lot of companies and most companies to be honest.

We're not doing much stateful applications in kubernetes Google design kubernetes to be a stateless application, but now It we see a shift going on. We see a shift where companies are moving more stateful applications and to kubernetes so here at Trillium. We've done our own internal survey of our customers and you can see the largest pie slice on the chart here 53% of the companies say that they have stateful volumes and Cooper and that he's now and then we've gone out and looked at a survey that the cncf organization did recently and you can see on this chart that again over 50% of organizations say yes, I have stateful applications running in containers and and you know all the way down to the smallest ones, you know the ones not yet, but even not yet that they still plan to be doing that in 12 months.

So now that you're moving stateful applications into kubernetes, it's definitely important that you have a good backup strategy in place. Myth number two. My traditional backup solution is enough to protect my cloud native apps.

So data protection has been around for a long time traditional data protection technology has been an IT industry for years and In that model, you're following infrastructure in that model. You're following. server hard drives you're following volumes associated with VMS, but now kubernetes is a complete architecture shift where you now have Clusters that have scalable worker nodes, you know, so clusters can scale up and scale Down based on on the needs of the application.

You also have applications that get distributed randomly across some number of random worker nodes. It's up to the kubernetes scheduler to take care of this as part of the resiliency of kubernetes. So that any of these worker knows are lost kubernetes can reshift everything.

A result of that the data protection model with traditional technology is broken, you know, you really need to re-architect your data protection for cloud native in kubernetes. Another traditional method is storage snapshots, you know provided by any number of storage vendors. That's how you do it.

They know that they're persistent data is living in these volumes and they provide some method for taking snapshots at those volumes, but now with kubernetes it's not just the volumes there's more to your application than just the persistent volumes. It's all of the metadata and and you know the metadata that's defining what pod is connected to what persistent volume so it's one thing to take storage snapshots. But when you try to restore a full application from those snapshots, it's very manual and it's very complicated to stitch all of that back together.

So that's something else that you need to be aware of we're traditional data protection really falls down in the Clayton Cloud native environment. And the last one is is open source backup and Recovery tools, so There's a number of Open Source projects out there today. That are that are doing kubernetes backup, but they really just do the bare minimum, you know that they are good for backing up things in one cluster restoring in that maybe into the same namespace in the same cluster, but it's really a limited functionality.

It really falls down when you talk about moving your application to another cluster or you know, there's typically no UI that comes with these tools. They're typically all command line tools very complex to install and use and and there's no support with open source, you know, there is support, you know, if you have a problem with an open source tool your best. Hope is to post to an open source forum and and hope that somebody gets back to you.

So just something to be aware of when you're when you're looking at these three traditional approaches to data protection and a cloud native environment. Some other things to be to be aware of is is the data loss, you know, when you're in the cloud native environment, if you're not protecting things in a proper way, you could be losing massive amounts of and data and not knowing it kubernetes is a very complex platform. So if you don't have something that shows you exactly everything that you have deployed in kubernetes.

You may be losing things that you don't know about. We've seen statistics that say that ransomware attacks. A lot of companies are could only recover 65% of their applications and and they couldn't recover the rest of it.

Complexity as I mentioned Cloud native and kubernetes Technologies are our comment that they provide a lot of good benefits, but some of the cost of that is the cost in complexity. So you really need to be on top of your kubernetes strategy in this environment. As service downtime.

So again. Being aware of having a good strategy in place for limiting that downtime that limits the that cost and time to your business that we mentioned earlier in the presentation and the time to restore your site, you know, every one of those minutes is costing your business money. So you've really got to reduce that time to restore your site and your applications to working production order.

So having a cloud native solution gives you speed here. So you're able to reduce the time reduce the time that that it takes in case the disaster strikes. So if you're using a cloud native data protection solution, you can reduce this and and our numbers show that a cloud native solution can improve that recovery time objective the RTO by up to 80% And and you can create Disaster Recovery plans that fit your needs, you know, maybe you have certain plans.

Maybe you want to restore things across different clouds, you know, if you're using the public Cloud today, we've all here in the news all the time about outages in all three of the major public Cloud providers. So maybe you want to do a strap a data recovery Disaster Recovery strategy that that spans multiple of these Cloud providers. So you really need to tailor that Disaster Recovery Solution and use a data protection solution that allows you to easily go between multiple clouds.

So again backing up to any Cloud any storage anytime you really need to be agnostic some Storage Solutions out there really try to lock you into that one storage or maybe lock you into one type of cloud. And so if you're going down that road even some of the public Cloud providers are starting to get into backup and data protection. But again those tools only work in those environments.

So if you're trying to expand your Cloud footprint across multiple Cloud providers, you're not going to be able to take that backup strategy from one cloud provider to another one. So you really need to have a technology that spans multiple clouds and multiple storages. Myth number three data protection is only about backup.

We hear this a lot from customers and they think You know really what I'm interested in for data backup is my backup and and recovery and that absolutely is is the first important thing to think about so that you're able to recover from these downtime issues that we've been talking about during the presentation, but there's more to data protection than that. There's Disaster Recovery that we just mentioned, you know, a lot of backup and recoveries are tailored to just restoring things in the platform that you started in, you know, Disaster Recovery is about as I've mentioned, you know, having Disaster Recovery kubernetes clusters that might be in a different cloud provider, you know, maybe you're you're doing things and on-prem and having a production Disaster Recovery in a public cloud. But it's not just about data protection is not just about when things go bad.

There's use cases like application Mobility, you know, so this is when you're developing your applications your app Dev test models. So you might have different levels of production. You might have a low Dev environment where your first building your applications and building your microservices.

Then you might have a second level staging environment and you want to move that application from development and staging you may be want to have it sit there for a few weeks perform to various smoke tests and production ready tests and then maybe a third environment as your production environment. So having the flexibility of a good data protection solution allows you to move these applications very easily between these different environments when you're going through these various stages of application testing and development. And then there's another use case along the same lines migration, you know, so you might be moving Cloud environments, you know, you might have been doing things for years in your on-prem environment, but now to save cost and all of the other benefits maybe that come with the public Cloud providers.

Maybe you want to move your applications to the public Cloud. So having a good data protection solution again allows you to easily move these applications between and migrate between these different environments from on-prem to public cloud or maybe public cloud back to on-prem. And ransomware protection and Recovery ability.

So it's not just about having a good backup. You have to make sure that that backup is protected from ransomware. The first thing that ransomware does is goes after your backup files tries to delete all of your backup files so that you have to pay that Ransom.

So you need to make sure that your data protection solution is aware and has things in place to protect you from those ransomware attacks and the ability that if a ransomware attack did take place you have a good Recovery Solution that you can quickly recover from that ransomware attack without having to pay the ransom. Thank you everyone for your time today. Don't forget to stop by the trilio virtual Booth where you can learn more about our Cloud native data protection resources, and we have some giveaways and more.

Thank you, everyone.