Kasten by Veeam’s Kanister Accepted by Cloud Native Computing Foundation as Sandbox Project

Kasten by Veeam announced that Kanister, an open-source framework that provides application-level backup and recovery, has been accepted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a Sandbox Project, indicating that the project adds value to the CNCF mission and encourages public visibility within the community.

Kanister, created as an open-source project in 2017, removes the tedious data management details around Kubernetes execution with sharable blueprints that make it to add, change or reuse workloads and providers so application-level data protection is consistent across hybrid clouds. The platform fosters freedom of choice and control of stateful workloads to provide users with a customizable experience that ensures data is well-protected.

In 2022, the Data on Kubernetes Community survey found 70% of respondents were running stateful applications in production while the DataDog Container Report found databases are the majority of stateful workloads. However, stateful workloads require orchestration before and after a CSI VolumeSnapshot to ensure an application-consistent state for backup and recovery – this becomes especially important amidst the rapidly growing ransomware attack threat, increasing by 12% in 2023, over the previous year.

Kanister helps solve this by providing ‘day 2’ data protection operations by coordinating Kubernetes storage, application services, and off-cluster backups, ensuring data is protected in the event of a breach. It puts Kasten’s experts with domain knowledge of specific applications in charge of tedious data management tasks with minimal application changes needed by the end user, adding an additional layer of security for an organization’s critical data.

“With Kanister, users have the ability to use existing blueprints or author their own with the confidence of knowing it is backed by Kubernetes experts with extensive domain knowledge,” said Danny Allan, CTO, Veeam Software, Inc. “This validation by the CNCF will only benefit our users, and we’re excited to see the community continue to flourish as a result.”

Since its inception, the Kanister community has contributed blueprints for a variety of databases, including AWS RDS, Postgres, MariaDB, and ElasticSearch, to provide data consistency for the growing wave of stateful workloads on Kubernetes.

“It’s fantastic to see how much progress the community makes every year in simplifying and scaling stateful operations in Kubernetes, and we are thrilled to donate Kanister to the CNCF to continue this mission,” said Thomas Manville, VP, Kasten Engineering. “Kanister was one of the early projects in the space and has grown up alongside other community projects such as CSI and database operators. The CNCF is the natural home for Kanister and we are excited to continue supporting the Kanister community in the years to come.”

Kasten by Veeam blends commercial and open-source platforms, including Kanister, into an enterprise data protection and management solution. It is a Platinum member of the CNCF and was giving demonstrations of Kanister at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America from November 6–9.

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“EDB Postgres for Kubernetes operator enables organizations to run Postgres on multiple and hybrid clouds. Our Kanister.io blueprint support extends our operator to provide application consistent data backup and recovery. EDB and Kanister.io unify data protection across the database and Kubernetes domain, keeping Postgres running and recoverable,” said Josef De Vries, chief product engineering officer, EDB.

“Kanister has allowed us to establish an application-level backup system with a project that is supported by the knowledge and experience within the entire community. Its flexibility, powered by application specific blueprints, allows us to not only use Kubernetes-native functionality like volume snapshots but to also leverage GCP-specific functionality including “Storage transfers” and “Cloud SQL Backups” to dramatically speed up the process. We rest easier knowing our application-level data is protected and well-managed by a team of Kubernetes experts, and being accepted by the CNCF is just another proof point of Kanister’s value to our organization,” said Jens Schneider and Sven Schliesing, cloud engineers, Norddeutscher Rundfunk.