This year, I have once again been fortunate enough to attend KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe, which is being held in Barcelona. This is my second such conference, having attended last years European event in Copenhagen. I was very interested in seeing how things have progressed, especially in the cloud native storage space. The morning started with the usual set of keynotes. Dan Kohn and Cheryl Hung filled us in on what is happening in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) space, sharing details about the increase in membership and contributors since the last conference. Of note, there are 7700 attendees…
If you’ve been following my posts for the last week or so, you’ll have noticed my write-ups on Velero backups and restores using the new release candidate (RC). I also did a recent write-up on Portworx volumes and snapshots. In this post, I’ll bring them both together, and show you how Velero and Portworx are integrated to allow backups and restores of container applications using Portworx volumes. However, first, let’s take a step back. As was highlighted to me recently, all of this is very new to a lot of people, so let’s spend a little time setting the context.…
Last week, the Velero team announced the availability of release candidate (RC) version 1.0.0. I was eager to get my hands on it and try it out. Since it is RC (and not GA), I thought I would just deploy a fresh environment for testing. The guidance from the Velero team is to test it out in your non-critical environments! On a number of Velero github sites, the links to download the binaries do not appear to be working, plus some of the install guidance is a little sparse. Anyhow, after some trial and error, I decided it might be…
As I continue on my cloud native storage journey, I found myself looking at Portworx. The reason for this was down to the fact that Portworx provide a plugin for the Heptio Velero product, and I was interested to see how this behaved on top of my vSphere on-premises infrastructure. I’ve written about Velero a few times already, and done a few posts where I leveraged the Restic plugin for snapshot functionality. Thus, I wanted to see how Portworx achieved the same thing, and wanted to learn about bit more about STORK, Portworx’s Storage Orchestrator for Kubernetes. I’ve written about…
A few weeks back, I took a look at Heptio Velero, formely known as Ark. Velero provides backup and restore capabilities for cloud native applications. During that research, I used a Couchbase DB as my application of choice for backup/restore. After speaking to Couchbase regarding that blog post, they strongly recommended I try the new Couchbase operator rather than the StatefulSet method that I was using for the application. Couchbase talk about the advantages of the operator approach over StatefulSets here. Now, while Couchbase provide steps on how to deploy Couchbase with their operator, they create it in the default…
I’ve been spending a bit of time lately look at our Heptio Velero product, and how it works with various cloud native applications. Next application on my list is MongoDB, another NoSQL database. I looked at various deployment mechanisms for MongoDB, and it seems that using Helm Charts is the most popular approach. This led me to the Bitnami MongoDB Stack Chart GitHub Repo. At this point, I did spin my wheels a little trying to get MongoDB stood up. In this post, I’ll talk through some of the gotchas I encountered. Once again, my environment is vSphere 6.7 and…
Those of you who work in the cloud native space will probably be aware of VMware’s acquisition of Heptio back in December 2018. Heptio bring much expertise and a number of products to the table, one of which I was very eager to try it. This is the Heptio Velero product, previously known as Heptio Ark. Heptio Velero provides a means to back up and restore cloud native applications. Interestingly enough, they appear to be able to capture all of the deployment details, so they are able to backup the pods (compute), persistent volumes (storage) and services (networking), as well…