Forecasts for the future of Cloud Native applications make interesting reading. By 2022, the IDC predicts 90% of new enterprise applications will be cloud-native. Forrester Now 2021 cloud computing report says that 60% of companies will leverage containers in public clouds, while 25% will go serverless by the end of 2021. It looks like most of the forward looking organizations are looking to take advantage of the lucrative combination of business agility with digital transformation and immutable infrastructure that cloud native technologies offer.
New research however shows, that it would be a mistake to assume that threats only concern the legacy infrastructures with virtual machines and traditional IT operations. For example Cloud Native Threat Report by Aquasec: Attacks in the Wild on the Container Supply Chain and Infrastructure, makes an interesting reading when evaluating the threats for business continuity in addition to system security.
As Cloud Native applications become more important for the daily operations, it is necessary to also look into the operations with cloud native applications. This concerns security practices, lifecycle management of ALL the components including containers, pipelines and kubernetes platforms and of course backups.
All mentioned items require extra attention with cloud native applications, because they operate differently from virtual machine driven. Same concerns with malware, ransomware, disaster recovery and needing a backup to bring back a messed up system still apply. Tooling and methods however are different.
We will return to the topics of system security and lifecycle management in another post – meanwhile Datalounges recommends looking into Rancher.
When considering the business continuity and recovery planning for the cloud native applications there are a number of items that are important to consider.
If applications have stateful data, that data has to be protected. Making a copy of that data in Public Cloud is a good step, but may not protect from a malicious attacker and is prone to corruption. Datalounges recommends storing a copy of the data in a different location from where the systems are actually running. To get time stamped copies, versioning of those backups is necessary.
As containers are not VM’s and there is a fundamental difference in how data is managed when containers are in question, it is recommended to use a Kubernetes native backup tool to manage the versioning and automate the copying. A Kubernetes native tool will be able to collect application context sensitive information from the platform and instead of just getting the data, prepare for quick and efficient disaster recovery. The good thing about disaster recovery with Kubernetes platforms and cloud native applications is, that once data and context is available – starting the application with the data is much more straightforward than with VM’s. This will also help organizations do better with their recovery objectives.
Datalounges offers a safe place for your data and backups. We recommend that customer run their backup and disaster recovery services in Datalounges capacity for workloads in in different clouds. This allows for efficient recovery objectives and a that necessary offsite, versioned set of copies of the critical data and context.
Contact us for more details. Don’t forget Cloud Native business continuity.
