Many companies adopting containers (a virtualized method for running distributed applications) don’t want to think about container-specific data protection. Can one blame them?

Switching from older infrastructure to containers and Kubernetes is enough work by itself. But data protection and backup are no laughing matters. So what new stuff do they need to buy? Will it involve much hassle?  

Unfortunately, users running containerized applications in Kubernetes can’t rely on the solutions they used to secure data in, say, virtual machines, according to Manoj Nair (pictured), general manager of Metallic.io, a Commvault venture. “You can’t just say, ‘OK, the data is in a VM; I’ll just do a snapshot and it will be fine.’ What about all of the container-specific namespaces, tags, the config maps, Pods — you cannot recover the cluster if you don’t have a real container-native solution,” Nair said. 

Ideally, this solution should also be delivered as a service with as little deployment and maintenance work required as possible. 

Nair spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA event. They discussed why built-in-cloud, as-a-service backup is best for containers and Kubernetes and why extras like ransomware protection are important. (* Disclosure below.)

Devs have enough stuff to deploy, thank you

Teams using containers in production don’t want the hassle of deploying software, according to Nair. For them, the ideal backup tool would work with just an API service call to a cloud target and no setup required. This is precisely what Metallic offers through its backup as a service. 

Metallic just announced three new offerings covering container users on the hybrid journey: Metallic for Database; Metallic for Unstructured data, file and object; and Metallic for VMs and Kubernetes. All are as a service and come with ransomware detection. Also, anyone who buys the last of the three in next six months gets unlimited Kubernetes backup for free for the life of the subscription. Essentially, they can buy it for VMs now and keep it for the containers they are slowly adopting or planning to adopt.  

“We want to make sure our early adopters [especially] are taking full advantage and they’re not compromising on the data protection for the cloud-native applications as they think through this transition,” Nair concluded. 

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA event. (* Disclosure: Commvault Systems Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Commvault nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE