Moving Kubernetes applications to the public cloud helps developers, DevOps and IT Ops to focus mostly on adding business value to their applications, while also ensuring scalability and high availability. However, it doesn’t magically solve all challenges for them that come with Kubernetes applications. In this episode of TFiR Insights, Ryan Kaw, Head of Global Sales at CloudCasa by Catalogic, talks about some of the misconceptions around moving K8s applications to the cloud, especially in terms of high data availability, data migration, data restore and more.

“There are tons of people moving their data into the cloud, and it does provide high availability, but there’s a difference between high availability and high data availability. Uptime doesn’t translate into the elimination of downtime,” said Kaw.

Martin Phan, Field CTO – North America, gave us a demo of CloudCasa to visually explain how CloudCasa helps developers and DevOps teams.

Key highlights from this video interview are:

• There is a misconception that just because data is in the cloud that it is protected. Although the cloud does provide high availability, this does not mean downtime is completely eliminated. Kaw explains how data loss can still occur and what the repercussions of it can be. He explains how leveraging data protection in the environment can help tackle this problem.
• CloudCasa’s SaaS solution helps customers get started quickly, from sign-up to registering clusters and installing it. Kaw explains what sets CloudCasa’s solutions apart from other key players and how it is beneficial to its users in the Kubernetes space.
• Kaw discusses some of the use cases where cross-cluster and cross-account restores in the same cloud are needed. He details the three main reasons why customers may need to move their data from production over to their development environment for test and development purposes.
• CloudCasa’s central management enables customers to see wherever their environment is, be it on-premises or in the cloud, as well as, with different clusters having different cloud providers. Kaw explains CloudCasa’s motivation behind offering support wherever you are going to regardless of which cloud provider is being used.
• Martin at CloudCasa provides TFiR with a product demonstration to show how their solution works in greater detail.

Guest: Ryan Kaw (LinkedIn, Twitter) | Martin Phan
Company: CloudCasa by Catalogic (Twitter)
Show: TFiR Insights
Keywords: Kubernetes Data Protection, Data Migration, Disaster Recovery For Applications

About Ryan Kaw: As Vice President of Global Sales for Catalogic and CloudCasa by Catalogic, Ryan is responsible for the company’s sales strategy and leads the global sales and solution engineering organizations. Ryan holds a B.S. from Rochester Institute of Technology, has more than 15 years of technology sales experience in data protection, and possesses a strong track record of building relationships and teams. A new area of focus for Ryan is assisting our partners with their cloud native workloads across Amazon EKS, DigitalOcean Kubernetes, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service, Microsoft AKS, Red Hat OpenShift, SUSE Rancher, and VMware Tanzu. Prior to running sales, Ryan was Senior Director of Technical Sales working with customers and technology partners such as IBM, NetApp, Pure Storage, and Storware.

About CloudCasa by Catalogic: CloudCasa by Catalogic is a powerful, cyber-resilient, backup service for protecting Kubernetes workloads, cloud databases, and cloud-native applications. With CloudCasa,  developers, DevOps and IT Ops can backup, recover, and migrate Kubernetes clusters and data, including cross-cluster, cross-region, cross-account, and cross-clouds. The Free Service Plan provides unlimited PV and RDS snapshots, no limits on worker nodes and clusters, free security scans, and first 100 GB of data for free, with no credit card or payment method required.

The summary of the show is written by Emily Nicholls.

[expander_maker]

Here is the automated and unedited transcript of the recording. Please note that the transcript has not been edited or reviewed. 

Swapnil Bhartiya: Hi, this is your host Swpanil Bhartiya and welcome to another episode of TFiR  Insights. And today we have with us Ryan Kaw, head of global sales at CloudCasa by Catalogic. Ryan, it’s great to have you on the show.

Ryan Kaw: Swapnil, thank you for having me.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Earlier we hosted your COO Sathya Sankaran and he talked about how CloudCasa is addressing the data production weaknesses of Kubernetes and redefining how data production should be delivered.  Today. We are going talk mostly about data protection, data migration, and disaster recovery for applications on AWS EKS. There seems to be a misconception that once you move to cloud, cloud takes care of almost everything, of course high availability and scalability can be expected but the same can’t be said for data protection or security. So what do you have to say,  just because somebody moved their kubernetes applications to a public cloud, should they still worry about high availability data protection?

Ryan Kaw: Yeah, definitely. So you’re correct. I do think that there is a misconception, there are tons of people moving their data into the cloud, and it does provide high availability, but there’s a difference between high availability and high data availability as well. Uptime doesn’t translate to the elimination of downtime, right? So when you think about certain things like configuration from a user, maybe they’ve accidentally deleted a cluster… I was just talking to a prospect last week and it was an infrastructure manager. They have their stuff on prem though. But he was telling me how there’s some shadow IT going on. And they started dabbling into the Kubernetes space too. And he was doing a data center migration. And long story short, during this migration process, they actually had data loss. And the developer was like, “Hey, where did my data go?”

He’s like, “I didn’t even realize you had this stuff, or did you need it to be protected for that matter?” Granted, it was only a test bed in environment, but still if that data was being protected, it could have saved them a ton of time from reconfiguring that cluster, bringing it back and then also repopulating that data in regards to the persistent volume. We also see other scenarios as well in regards to things like auditing, where you might be asked to go ahead and bring an application configuration back to a specific point in time as, as well. So I certainly do think if somebody’s leveraging data protection in their environment using something like CloudCasa, it certainly would behoove them.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Thanks for sharing that example. I am sure there are many customers who have experienced that. Now, when we talk about AWS or public cloud in general, it’s a crowed space even for data protection and data recovery. Generally people look at it as ‘all we need is to restore the data’. It’s also a sticky market. So can you tell our viewers how does CloudCasa differentiate itself from other player which may include the cloud provider themselves, incumbent data protection vendor or even some open source projects?

Ryan Kaw: So I think a couple of things that come into my mind as far as from a differentiation standpoint, is first off, we’re a SaaS solution. So from deployment and getting off the ground and running, it’s very, very quick. You sign up onto our website and then you just start registering your clusters and installing it from there. And with us, especially in regards to EKS there’s inventories, automatic inventories, because we plug into AWS cloud foundation as well. And then also bare metal recovery, like that patent I was telling you about. Some people don’t really talk about licensing. I think we’re very unique from a licensing standpoint too, where all of our competitors out there, they are licensing on worker nodes versus where we’re going from a capacity standpoint, which is certainly beneficial to users in the Kubernetes space.

Swapnil Bhartiya:  One more thing I want to talk about is customer’s ability to do cross cluster and cross account restores in the same cloud. Can you talk about some use-cases where customers need such capability or more broadly, why it’s needed?

Ryan Kaw: Yeah, absolutely. And I’ll give you a real life example. So there’s a large pharma company that’s leveraging cloud cost today for that specific reason. Cross cluster resource, cross account restore as well. So specific to their environment, they have a production environment, with a prod AWS account, and a dev environment with a dev account as well. And what they really needed to do was take that data from prod, move it over to their development for test and dev purposes. And we helped achieve that. And obviously when we go through a product demonstration, you’ll be able to see that firsthand as well. As far as, why do I think they’re doing that? I think there’s really three main reasons. One being security in the respect that you probably do not want to give your developers access to the prod environment.

Number two is development speed. If you have a developer in your prod environment, they’re going to be a little bit hesitant on what they can bring up, what they can bring down, et cetera, as well. So giving them their own play pen, their own environment is crucial. And then from a billing aspect as well, to financially understand where is your money going towards? So that’s why you have that different pockets and segregation as well too.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Thanks for sharing those three reasons why people may need it, what about cross cloud store. I mean we live in a multi-cloud world people run workloads in different clouds for different reasons. How realistic is the cross cloud restore?

Ryan Kaw: Yeah, so I think when we look at Kubernetes environment and as environments are continuing to scale and to have many more and more and more clusters, you’re going to have different cloud providers as well. I think every cloud provider has specific incentives for you to host it over there versus here. From our perspective, we want to be agnostic. At the end of the day, we just want to support where you’re going to, you obviously have your benefits and so forth. But as these things continue to scale up and you try to do things manually per se, it is very, very difficult. And I think with our solution, having a central management pane of glass for wherever your environment is, whether it’s on-prem or in various areas of the cloud, I think that’s certainly key as well. Nobody wants to be locked into a specific vendor anymore.

And then I think if you look at, from a business continuity standpoint as well, one cloud provider may go down for whatever specific reason. You’re going to want to host it at somewhere else. But at the same time, what if you’re required to protect that data as well? So we can go ahead. We don’t really care as long as you register our clusters, we’ll be able to go ahead and protect it. And I think, like I said, the specific things, especially unique to EKS is auto-discovery of your clusters. Being able to pick up any new clusters that you deploy, apply it to a specific policy and get that stuff backed up. And then in the event that you ever need to restore, that you have that bare metal recovery feature, or if you want to restore it to a new cluster or something else, or the original one, we give you all of that flexibility as well.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Excellent thanks for explaining that. Now we also have Martin Phan Field CTO – North America who is going to give us a demo of CloudCasa to show us most of what Ryan and I just talked about. Martin, the floor is all yours.

Demo…

Martin, Ryan thank you so much for taking time out and talk about how CloudCasa by Catalogic is helping customers in AWS EKS, and I would love you have to back on the show. Thank you.

[/expander_maker]