Did you know service providers who deliver Kubernetes management and data protection services will find a fast-growing, addressable market for years to come? The unrelenting application modernization — and the resulting shift toward micro-services — has made containerized architecture the inevitable infrastructure of choice. A growing number of organizations are now leveraging Kubernetes-as-a-Service (KaaS) providers to manage their micro-service architecture, easing the burden on their DevOps and engineering teams, especially given the widespread and deepening shortage of qualified staff. According to 451 Research, 47% of organizations have adopted and are currently using cloud-native technologies, while another 35% plan to implement these technologies within the next 24 months.*

As containerized applications move from testing and development to production, more stateful workloads emerge. These stateful workloads contain persistent data that is crucial to business success. While the importance of protecting test and dev data shouldn’t be discounted, once an app moves to production, data protection becomes business-critical. Offering native-built data protection for Kubernetes not only opens up new streams of revenue; it positions you as a trusted advisor along your customer’s Digital Transformation journey.

Why native-built data protection for Kubernetes?

According to IDC’s Worldwide Data Protection as a Service Forecast, 2022 – 2026, container-based applications are a growing part of the IT application portfolio and are ideal candidates for Backup as a Service (BaaS). We believe that a sizable portion of future cloud-native applications will be container-based and will drive ongoing data protection purchase decisions.** This is incredibly good news for Managed Service Providers (MSPs), who can position themselves early in the market as trusted sources for protecting cloud-native architecture as a service.

Stateful workloads running in production present complex data management challenges — all of which beg the question of how to best protect these workloads. You may ask, “Why can’t I leverage the backup software I already use to protect my virtual machines?” The short answer is, you could. However, just like trying to leverage physical agents to backup and recover virtual machines, it’s resource-intensive and makes for a time-consuming recovery process. Containerized applications running on Kubernetes are spread across multiple pods and nodes — meaning you could lose out on application consistency and recoverable data.

Backing up Kubernetes data is one thing — but trust in your backup technology becomes vitally important in the recovery process. How fast can I get my customers’ data back up and running? Will the data remain application-consistent and namespace-aware with my customers’ Kubernetes environments? What service level agreements (SLAs) did I agree to for recovery time objectives (RTOs)? How will recovery affect my service team’s bandwidth?

Using native software that understands the processes and resources that containerized applications are built on helps you feel more confident when answering the questions above.

Introducing Kasten by Veeam

By adding Kasten K10 to your service offerings, you can provide your customers with peace of mind as they embark on their Digital Transformation journey. K10 sits inside the Kubernetes environment and becomes integrated with Kubernetes APIs. Native snapshots give you point-in-time images, keeping applications and dependencies consistent for faster recovery and easier mobility.

Kasten K10 provides DevOps teams using Kubernetes applications with an easy-to-use, scalable and secure system for backup, restore, disaster recovery and application mobility. With a core operator focus and a powerful, easy-to-use UI, Kasten makes your engineers and practitioners successful and efficient when managing your customers’ cloud-native data protection strategy — all while meeting your SLAs. K10 also enables extensibility within your Kubernetes cluster by becoming part of the Kubernetes API. This means you can leverage GitOps and other automation tools to succeed faster. Further, in a very similar way to Veeam Backup & Replication, K10 provides freedom of choice regarding where and how your Kubernetes platform is hosted or running.

Intelligent policy settings allow you to be extremely specific, allowing you to operationalize what functions you want your backup jobs to perform. Architecturally, Kasten K10 shares close similarities to existing Veeam products, meaning there’s an exceptionally low learning curve for exiting Veeam service providers. Below are the three main use cases that Kasten K10 solves for:

Backup and restore

Policies are used to automate your data management workflows. To achieve this, policies combine the actions you want to take (e.g., snapshots), the frequency of how often you want to take that action and a label-based selection criteria for the resources you want to manage. By associating applications with policies, you can achieve a hands-off approach to scaling the operational workflow for your backup and application mobility needs.

Disaster recovery

K10 allows you to restore the application components you want, where you want them. An application can be cloned into the same or a new namespace. You can also decide to restore application subsets alone, such as data volume. The flexible approach makes restoring simple and powerful by also allowing you to select the appropriate point-in-time copy of the application.

Application mobility

Kasten K10 provides the ability to move an application across namespaces, clusters, accounts, regions and clouds. This enables a variety of use cases, including disaster recovery, test/dev with realistic data sets and performance testing in isolated environments.

To sum it up

Kubernetes is currently being adopted by organizations at a quick pace around the globe. Kubernetes is well on its way to emerge as the de facto platform for cloud-native computing across all business segments. MSPs who have a strong core competency in standing up containerized infrastructure, who offer value-based services to newly emerging DevOps teams, will find quick market penetration and a growing addressable market for years to come. Once stateful applications become part of the engine that runs your customers’ business, data protection becomes even more crucial. No matter where data lives — virtual, physical, SaaS, public cloud or Kubernetes — it needs to be protected.

Being able to offer the correct tools and services to make Kubernetes data management easy and accessible will solidify your value as a trusted advisor to your customers’ data protection needs. Kasten K10’s similarities to already-known Veeam products lowers the learning curve for both your technicians and your customers’ DevOps teams. Take it from one of our Veeam Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP) partners, Mark Tew, CEO of Cyberlogic, when he says: “We weren’t 100% happy with the results delivered by the native backup and recovery tool, so we decided to do a trial of Kasten K10. It worked flawlessly.” You can read the entire case study here.

Get started quickly

The VCSP program is designed specifically for service providers to help scale and manage their BaaS and DRaaS business, including access to OPEX-style licensing, purpose-built monitoring and management tools.

With a pay-as-you-grow licensing model, you will report monthly usages via a self-service portal for your customer’s protected workloads — for virtual, physical, SaaS, public cloud and Kubernetes. Partner discount tiers will become available to you as you scale, which can be used for better pricing.

The VCSP program also provides additional revenue opportunities by helping Value-Added Resellers (VARs) and MSPs access our global network of service providers with referral, resale and white-label options. Regardless of your business model, you can build your recurring revenue business with Veeam-powered BaaS for Kubernetes.

Click here to learn more about how to get started with the VCSP Program.

• 451 Research’s Voice of the Enterprise: Cloud Native, Adoption & Usage 2022.

** IDC, Worldwide Data Protection as a Service Forecast, 2022 – 2026, #US49720522, November 2022