Cloud Field Day #CFD11 took place a few weeks ago (June 23–25, 2021) and I was fortunate enough to had been selected as a delegate. This marks my 5th engagement as a delegate. Due to the state of the world we are in right now this event was again virtual.
For those who are not familiar with TechFieldDay, GestaltIT, or Stephen Foskett, check out their website here. In a nutshell, companies present new technology and products to a panel of delegates. The events are live-streamed on YouTube (CFD11 was the first one to stream on LinkedInLive as well). Topics vary greatly, from storage to networking to virtualization. Certain TechField Days focus on one specific aspect of technology, like NetworkFieldDay or in this case CloudField Day. If you are interested in participating in a Field day, head over to the application page to become a delegate.
Being able to have direct conversations with presenting companies is something I greatly appreciate. After the stream, delegates and presenters have a break-out session, where honest feedback is exchanged and questions can be asked that might be more “direct” in nature.
Presenting sponsors this time where:
Some great discussion took place and I can say for sure more than once my head was spinning, trying to grasp a concept that I was not familiar with. Part of what makes TFD so great is the delegates come from all over the world with different backgrounds. Some might be strong in storage, others are deep in networking every day. Others dream of kubectl at night and backup Kubernetes at day.
Speaking of Kubernetes, since Kasten was acquired by Veeam a little while back I’ve seen a lot of rapid release by Kasten in a short time. I believe currently a new version comes out every two weeks. This in addition to a lot of outreach and demos to show the capabilities of Kasten made for an interesting presentation.
Now, full disclosure, as much as I want to say we run hundreds of containers at work, we don’t. I’ve dabbled in it at my home lab and thanks @DCVMUG (you should check them out!) I was able to do a course with KubeAcedemy. Nevertheless, it is a fascinating technology. (no, not every business need can be answered by running it in a container though)
So, for those who have not heard of Kasten, in a sentence (thank you Michael Cade) “Purpose-built for Kubernetes, Kasten K10 provides enterprise operations teams an easy-to-use, scalable, and secure system for backup/restore, disaster recovery, and mobility of Kubernetes applications.”
One might ask why do I need to back up containers, isn’t one of the main arguments for containers there are stateless? While this is true for the container itself, persistent application data must be stored in one of three forms: block, file, or object. In addition, stateful applications, like SQL for example can be run in containers nowadays, but should be backed up in an application-aware fashion to have consistent backups. Kasten fills that need, as it is application-aware.
From a business perspective, a developer (or customer) does not care where the database runs on. But a developer would care very much if an error was made and the infrastructure team can roll back the database to exact the point before a table was dropped.
Another nice feature are dashboards to show what is being backed up, storage consumed and policies applied.
Yes, policies can be created and applied to groups of containers/applications. Lastly, I want to point out another great feature for DR/Recovery purposes. Kasten can be used to replicate between datacenters and failover/failback in case of disaster. And this can also be controlled by policies.
Clearly, there are a lot of possibilities and I highly recommend visiting their website and looking at the White Papers. Also, Kasten’s helpfile is up there (which I really appreciated) to have a quick look.
Finally, all the reading doesn’t really help until one gets to try and play with the product. Kasten offers a forever-free version of up to 10 nodes, perfect for a home lab. Grab it here.
Thanks again to all the sponsors and the team at TechField day for another awesome event!