Setting up Velero 1.0.0 to backup K8s on vSphere/PKS

I have written about Velero a few times on this blog, but I haven’t actually looked at how you would deploy the 1.0.0 version, even though it has been available since May 2019. Someone recently reached out to me for some guidance on how to deploy it, as there are a few subtle differences between previous versions. Therefore I decided to document step-by-step how to do it, but focusing on when your Kubernetes cluster is running on vSphere. I also highlight a gotcha when using Velero to backup applications that are running on Kubernetes deployed via Enterprise PKS, Pivotal Container…

Velero and Portworx – Container Volume Backup and Restores

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.…

Getting started with Velero 1.0.0-rc.1

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…

Portworx, STORK and container volume snapshots

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 first look at the Couchbase Operator

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…

A first look at Velero (previously known as Ark)

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…