Kasten by Veeam's Kanister becomes a CNCF incubating project

Bart: Who are you? What's your role? And who do you work for?

Michael: Yeah, I'm Michael Cade. I'm a field CTO or a technologist at Veeam Software, focused on our cloud and cloud-native technologies and open source.

Bart: What do you want to share today?

Michael: So I want to talk about Kanister. Kanister is an open source project. Actually, it's been evolving since Chicago timeframe, so KubeCon in Chicago back end of last year. And really now we're... Kanister is now an incubating project within the CNCF landscape.

Bart: What problem does Kanister solve?

Michael: So Kanister is focused on the data service that you're running either inside your cluster or outside of your Kubernetes cluster. So if you think about Postgres, you think about MongoDB, think about all of the different operator models, CMPG, for example, we need to take a backup of those so that we're secure and that we can get back up and running as and when we need to. The Kanister framework, the blueprint model that we have, targets those data services so that we can take a consistent copy of that data and send that off into object storage or NFS.

Bart: Could you share the before and after this product announcement?

Michael: Yeah, so we started to see, so Kanister, not only did we use it in our commercial product that I'll touch on shortly, but also there was a lot of a large community uptick of blueprint creation from the database community, but also around the community actually using this. to provide that application consistent copy, that backup of their database and dump that out into object storage. What we've also then seen is all the amazing ways of which you can use the project, but equally around integrations into other open source tooling like Prometheus to get some metrics from that. And in general, it's around those blueprints and how to take those consistent copies of the data.

Bart: Is Kanister open source in part of the CNCF landscape?

Michael: Yeah, yeah. So... I would say from September 2023 onwards, we've been working with the CNCF to donate the Kanister project. And it's now set as a CNCF incubating project on the landscape. Yeah, so it's a sandbox project.

Bart: What's Veeam's business model?

Michael: So we're primarily in the Kubernetes space. We're focusing on protecting that data. But actually what we're seeing a large majority of our customer base do is actually using this to... provide mobility of that data. So whether you're moving from one Kubernetes cluster to another, maybe you're going from one cloud to another, maybe you're going from on-prem to the cloud, the ability to protect that data but also move that. If we look at Veeam in general, Veeam has a whole data platform. If you think about all the different platforms that are out there, virtual machines, physical cloud, even SaaS, we've got probably an option to protect that workload, protect that data. So it's really about protecting data and providing mobility for that data so we can restore it, leverage it. do something with it wherever we need it to be.

Bart: Who are your main competitors?

Michael: So from a Veeam custom perspective, I think our biggest competitor is not doing anything. Like backup is always very boring. It's right down here on the Christmas list. No one really wants to do it. But actually we're starting to see a massive uptick around security requirements, around having to have a copy of that data protected. So the biggest competitor is not doing anything. And the second would be around, oh, we don't need backup. But. because they're not running stable workloads inside of the cluster, which is, again, not necessarily true, as long as they're protecting their path-based services, such as Amazon RDS. Again, we've got the ability to capture that whole application so that we can get everything in one place as a consistent copy of that backup. So I would say, actually, our biggest competitor is Velero from an open-source perspective, but some of the differentiators that we have with and against Velero... Velero is our application consistency that we just talked about. Now, could Velero go and use Kanister? Absolutely. It's open source. It's on the CNCF landscape. There's some other bits about Velero can't go outside of the cluster and look after that whole data story within the application, but it might just be enough. And that's fine, right? That's what helps us raise awareness of data protection and security within the community.

Bart: What differentiates Kanister and Veeam from the competition?

Michael: Yeah, so Veeam Kasten. Obviously focused on Kubernetes or cloud-native services, microservices, being able to protect those. The key... Differentiator is one that mobility story. So when I said about going from one cloud to another, we've got the ability to transform what that application even looks like. So if you go from one cloud to another, generally that cloud native storage is going to be called something different. It's going to look and feel maybe a little bit different. We've got the ability, just one example of a transform could be the storage class. So where we restore that PVC into the new location, we take that storage class of the target cluster And we make that change accordingly. I would say the application consistency is another huge area. And then maybe the multi-cluster piece. So if you've got multiple Kubernetes clusters, maybe you've got Cloud A, Cloud B and on-premises because you've got different workloads running all over. But maybe you've got a mixture of different databases, data services across all of them. we can pull those together in a multi-cluster dashboard and then start defining global policies against those data services, against those applications. So probably those three would be my top of the league.

Bart: What's next for you? And also, what's next for Kanister?

Michael: So one is, this is our first endeavor into the project pavilion. So it's been some great traction, some great communication there, interaction there. So what I'm really excited about is where does the community take the blueprint creation But equally about what else can we as a community really help drive and what else can we do with Kanister as a project.