IBM is excited to announce Trilio has completed their certification for IBM Cloud.

TrilioVault for Kubernetes (TVK) is now available in the IBM Cloud marketplace for Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud and IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service.

How do I deploy TVK from the IBM Catalog on a managed OpenShift or Kubernetes cluster in the IBM Cloud?

• Search for Trilio in the IBM Cloud Catalog.
• Select the target: IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service or RedHat OpenShift on IBM Cloud.
• Select your cluster running in IBM Cloud and deploy (detailed instructions available here):

Highlights

• TVK now offers automated installation, upgrades and lifecycle management via the IBM Cloud Marketplace
• Support for both IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service and Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud
• Validation and support for IBM Cloud Satellite
• Application-consistent backups using hooks for databases and container-based applications within IBM Cloud
• Support for IBM Cloud Object Storage as a backup target

Overview

The IBM Cloud platform is built to support your needs, whether that’s working in the public cloud only or taking advantage of a multicloud deployment model. With open source technologies like Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift and a full range of compute options, including virtual machines, containers, bare metal and serverless, you have the control and flexibility that’s required to support workloads in your hybrid environment. You can deploy cloud native apps while also ensuring workload portability.

Cloud native, containerized applications have become more mature and are now an essential part of enterprise IT deployments. Auto-deployment, scaling, portability, application consistency, data protection and management are all important areas to consider for such an environment.

Data protection challenges in the public cloud

Protecting workloads via cloud native tools can be complex and limited. To protect cloud workloads and data, organizations frequently resort to creating their own scripts to orchestrate the different snapshot and replication methods available within the various cloud services. These scripts can be difficult to maintain, audit and scale as your organization takes advantage of the flexibility and elasticity of the public cloud. And, if your organization has regulatory or business process requirements to create secondary copies of backups in other cloud providers or in your on-premises data center, this complexity increases dramatically.

TrilioVault for Kubernetes provides easy data protection and management, which includes Backup and Restore, Migration and Disaster Recovery. It is designed from the ground up to support the scale, performance and mobility requirements of Kubernetes container environments across any public or hybrid cloud environment.

TrilioVault for Kubernetes architecture overview

TrilioVault for Kubernetes offers several important advantages over more traditional data protection and backup solutions: 

• Application-centric: It protects data, metadata and Kubernetes objects.
• Easy installation: It includes demos and test-drive scenarios with substantial product documentation and comes in three different versions. The product can be installed via Helm charts/OLM install and can also be installed at a namespace scope or cluster scope.
• Storage-compatible: It supports NFS, CSI or S3 and users can point to AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud or a private cloud as the backup target. 
• Ecosystem tooling: It backs up applications provisioned by Labels, Helm or Operators within Amazon EKS, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKS), Rancher Server with RKE, Red Hat OpenShift and upstream Kubernetes.
• Certified: The product is OpenShift-Operator certified and can be installed from OperatorHub. It is certified for IBM Cloud Paks; therefore, if you are running any of these in the IBM Cloud, you are covered in the support matrix.
• Open Backup Schema: TrilioVault for Kubernetes stores backups in an open QCOW2 format, which means that the backup is not stored in any proprietary format and thus augments the “open” nature of cloud native environments.

TrilioVault for Kubernetes supports the following use cases in the IBM Cloud for Kubernetes Service and managed OpenShift users:

Backup and recovery

• Point-in-time backup and recovery to recover from data corruption.
• Schedule automated incremental backups with pre-defined policies or on-demand.
• Selectively restore containers and applications to the same or a new namespace.

Disaster recovery

• Build disaster recovery strategies leveraging TrilioVault backup data in IBM Cloud.
• In the event of a disaster, recover any Kubernetes application quickly in the same cluster or any Kubernetes Service or managed OpenShift cluster hosted on IBM Cloud across the globe.

Migration

• Enable migration of your application and data from your private cloud to IBM public cloud or between public clouds to achieve better TCO or tighter control of your data.
• Migrate applications from an upstream Kubernetes cluster to IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service or RedHat OpenShift platform on the IBM Cloud infrastructure.

Test/Dev

• Build multiple testing environments using TrilioVault backups from a single target location to develop and validate code and push changes to production.

Summary

We are at a point where cloud providers like IBM are recognized for removing the massive overhead of building and maintaining physical infrastructure. This comes with benefits, such as the ability to start small and scale your costs with your business growth, offering flexible and affordable software platforms to organizations across all industries and reducing time to market by enabling you to deploy your solutions globally at the click of a button. Now organizations can focus on implementing digital transformation.

These days, the adoption of container technologies in the application deployment domain is growing rapidly. Kubernetes comes in handy for deployments of such modern cloud native applications.

These application environments — driven by containers and orchestrated by Kubernetes in the cloud — present some unique challenges in terms of data protection needs. With the growing amount of data in Kubernetes-based applications, finding an easy data management and protection solution can be difficult. 

TrilioVault for Kubernetes provides solutions for the data protection needs of container-driven and Kubernetes-orchestrated applications and deployments and is highly successful in managing business-critical workloads with application-centric backup and recovery.

Try TrilioVault for Kubernetes and give us your feedback

If you have questions or concerns, engage our team via Slack. You can register here and join the discussion in the #general channel on https://ibm-cloud-success.slack.com.