Cloud Native Application Backups using PX-Backup

Every IT organization needs backups. Maybe IT Ops needs to recover an application to a previous point in time before a bug was introduced or needs to retrieve a data set from three years ago to answer a compliance question. For containerized applications, the process of backing up applications, tracking secondary data across multiple environments, and recovering applications has been piecemeal and manual. Some tools exist to trigger a backup but they require integration with traditional enterprise storage systems that don’t work well in Kubernetes environments and don’t provide a complete end-to-end enterprise backup solution.

Today, we are announcing PX-Backup to address these challenges head-on. As an end-to-end backup solution designed for Kubernetes applications, PX-Backup manages the container data lifecycle, catalogs the relevant metadata, improves visibility of data access, and enables restoration of full Kubernetes applications including data, application configuration and Kubernetes objects with a single click. PX-Backup supports backups for applications storing their data on both Portworx Enterprise as well as directly on cloud block storage from Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud managed via the Kubernetes CSI plugin.

Introducing PX-Backup

A Kubernetes application consists of one or more pods and other Kubernetes objects. These Kubernetes objects can include but are not limited to deployments, StatefulSets, pods, roles, secrets, configuration maps, and persistent volumes to store persistent application data.
PX-Backup introduces a new approach to backing up your Kubernetes applications by focusing on:

• Application Backups
  Backing up data alone is not enough. PX-Backup enables enterprises to backup entire Kubernetes or OpenShift applications including their data, application configuration and Kubernetes objects. These backups can be triggered based on a user-defined schedule, or on-demand.

• Kubernetes Namespace and OpenShift Project awareness
  PX-Backup enables you to backup individual pods, groups of pods based on labels or an entire Kubernetes namespace or OpenShift Project with a single click. When a backup is taken, PX-Backup maintains the original namespace awareness so that the end-user can decide to restore all the apps to the same namespace on the new Kubernetes cluster.

• Support for multi-cluster and multi-cloud environments
  PX-Backup allows enterprises to manage backups of different Kubernetes clusters running on different on-prem or cloud environments from a single user interface. The ability to backup applications running on different Kubernetes clusters allows PX-Backup to provide visibility into the source environments for backups and easily manage the life-cycle of all your backup data assets, even when they spread across different cloud environments.

• Ability to manage and import cloud volumes
  Even if a user is not using Portworx Enterprise to store their container volumes, they can still use PX-Backup. PX-Backup provides seamless integration directly with cloud drives from partners like GCP, AWS, and Azure. The solution will also allow you to import persistent volumes from cloud drives to Portworx Enterprise provisioned volumes.

• Restore applications using Cluster, Namespace or Label selectors
  PX-Backup allows end-users to select and restore a backup from a particular date. The restore workflow also allows users to filter backups using a specific cluster, namespace or label construct in order to reduce the restore time of the modern application. Enterprises can also search volume backups for particular files.

• Data asset and backup governance capability
  PX-Backup has the capability to keep track of information about the application backup’s source cluster. This will allow users to manage the backup assets’ lifecycle long after the original cluster has been decommissioned. The ability to keep track of backup and restore using audit logs can also help with data life cycle management and auditing data backup assets.

PX-Backup is an innovative approach to backing up modern workloads running on Kubernetes and OpenShift. We are excited to share the new approach with our customers and partners. If you are going to be at KubeCon North America, please stop by Portworx Booth for a live demo of PX- Backup. We plan to publish additional information about the solution in the coming months. If you would like to request a PX-Backup demo and or want to participate in the early-access program, please contact us.