SUSE CaaS Platform Adds Kubernetes Backup and More | SUSE Communities

SUSE CaaS Platform Adds Kubernetes Backup and More

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Have you noticed that the SUSE CaaS Platform team has been adding significant new enhancements to our Kubernetes container management platform every few weeks?  It’s true!  The team has been releasing new capabilities at a rapid pace, responding to specific needs of our enterprise customers and delivering upstream Kubernetes advances.

Back in January, we introduced a web-based GUI for multi-cluster management, and comprehensive monitoring and visualization tooling to help you gain better insights into your application and cluster operations.  We also updated the platform base from Kubernetes 1.15 to Kubernetes 1.16.

Since then we’ve added new Kubernetes backup capabilities that enable platform operators to manage business continuity and assure data compliance better, and to use infrastructure more flexibly.  We’ve also simplified public cloud deployments, and updated the platform core to Kubernetes 1.17.  Let’s take a closer look at some of those more recent enhancements.

 

Manage business continuity risk and data compliance with Kubernetes backup

If managing business continuity risk and data compliance are important to you, then you’ll appreciate the flexible, automated Kubernetes backup capabilities recently introduced in SUSE CaaS Platform.  You can now protect, preserve, and recover valuable cluster state, so you’ll be ready… just in case.  You can now:

  • Protect your cluster, applications, and services from data loss due to a system failure, data corruption event, malicious attack, or accident. You can automate backups of your cluster, including stateful applications and services, and quickly recover exactly what you need.  Backup/restore capabilities can also be incorporated into a disaster recovery plan to help increase overall system availability.
  • Ensure data compliance to support data discovery and compliance auditing. SUSE CaaS Platform can be set up to retain a history of your cluster state, so you can retrieve a copy of your cluster as it existed at any point in time.
  • Mitigate failure risk by backing up your cluster before performing a potentially damaging operation. If the operation produces harmful effects, you can recover your cluster to its previous, known-good state.

 

 

Use infrastructure more flexibly

You can leverage Kubernetes backup capabilities to play offense as well as defense. Use them to migrate and replicate clusters to transfer workloads between infrastructure environments at will. This opens new opportunities to:

  • Optimize workload and cluster placement by moving clusters or workloads from one cloud to another.
  • Improve consistency across the application delivery pipeline by copying clusters or workloads from one environment to another. For example, you can create a staging environment by replicating your dev/test environment rather than re-building an exact duplicate from scratch. Or, replicate a faulty production deployment to share with the dev/test team.
  • Update Kubernetes by migrating workloads from an older Kubernetes instance to a newer Kubernetes instance.
  • Innovate more rapidly by setting up and tearing down cluster infrastructure repeatedly and routinely, without ever losing cluster state. Decoupling the state of a cluster from the resources on which it is deployed facilitates much more flexible use of infrastructure for application testing and other purposes, and thereby helps speed delivery of modern applications.

 

Simplify multi-cloud management

If you, like most everyone(!), want to take advantage of multi-cloud infrastructure, you were probably very glad to learn that SUSE CaaS Platform added multi-cluster, multi-cloud management capabilities back in January, giving you a consolidated view and single management portal into your expanding Kubernetes estate.  And, to further simplify multi-cloud management, you may have already taken advantage of the ability to run SUSE CaaS Platform on public cloud infrastructure to make your public and on-premises Kubernetes clusters more consistent and uniformly manageable.  What’s new now is the ability to apply a simple, automated, and consistent method for deploying SUSE CaaS Platform across your on-premises and public cloud environments, which helps you simplify multi-cloud management still more.

The latest release of SUSE CaaS Platform introduces this new deployment approach, which leverages Terraform automation, to public clouds, starting with Amazon Web Services infrastructure.*  This extend our current use of Terraform automation for on-premises deployments, where it helps reduce errors and speeds the overall deployment process. Now you can realize those same quality improvements and time savings when you deploy to public cloud infrastructure, while simplifying multi-cloud management by increasing consistency.

 

Optimize cluster efficiencyKubernetes logo

Finally, the update to Kubernetes 1.17 also provides notable enhancements that help you optimize cluster efficiency, including orchestration, performance, and troubleshooting improvements.  As a cluster or application administrator, you can take advantage of:

  • Scheduling improvements, including enhancements that allow workload exclusion properties (“taints”) to be set automatically in response to node conditions, and in daemon scheduling
  • Storage placement optimization with container storage interface (CSI) topology support
  • Better troubleshooting and cooperative processing with namespace sharing
  • Performance optimization capabilities including serialization and heartbeat optimization support

 

Wow – that’s a lot of great new stuff!  Existing customers can get it all in the latest SUSE CaaS Platform release, available for download through the usual channels.   If you are not yet using SUSE CaaS Platform, give it a try today – or take advantage of our limited time Accelerate Innovation offer, which gives you free access to the complete SUSE Container and Application Platforms stack, along with free support and training, and reduced consulting services to help you start successfully.

 

*Introduced as a Technology Preview

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