In today’s tech-driven world, AI-powered applications are everywhere, shaping a new era for data resilience and security. A 2022 survey by the Data on Kubernetes Community (DoKC) found that 50% of organizations run AI and machine learning algorithm workloads on Kubernetes clusters. With businesses relying more on AI and handling a ton of valuable data, it’s crucial that you ensure rock-solid data resilience and top-notch security. This gets even trickier in cloud-native, Kubernetes-driven setups, where keeping data safe and accessible is key.
But fear not, because Veeam Kasten and Kyverno joined forces to make data resilience more scalable and secure. Kasten is the #1 solution for Kubernetes data protection and mobility, while Kyverno is a modern policy engine for Kubernetes. Together, they can help your businesses customize, manage, and scale your cloud-native applications while beefing up security.
In this blog, we’ll take a deep dive into how the combination of Kasten and Kyverno offers an unbeatable solution for achieving true data resilience and rigorous security in cloud-native applications. This integration ensures that businesses can maintain the flexibility and agility of their Kubernetes environment without compromising on safety and reliability.
Kubernetes Data Resilience with Kasten
In cloud-native applications, resiliency is not a given, especially in Kubernetes deployments where applications and data intricately coexist. To address this modern challenge, Kasten’s data management platform boosts Kubernetes’ inherent data protection capabilities with advanced backup and recovery strategies.
With Kasten, backups are application-centric, which ensures consistent protection across different storage classes and cloud environments. One of the best safeguards against ransomware is to ensure data integrity. Immutable storage is vital to data security, since “immutability” prevents changes or deletions after data is written. This protects backups from alterations, malicious or inadvertent, to assure data integrity. Kasten boosts data resilience by creating unalterable data snapshots and backups that are stored securely in AWS S3, Azure Blob Storage, or Google Cloud storage.
Kasten also keeps your data safe throughout this process by focusing on the latest security standards in the market. Recently Kasten announced V7.0 FIPS 140-3 compliance on OpenShift. This ensures that cutting-edge cryptographic modules are being leveraged. Endorsing a secure-by-design’ approach, Kasten incorporates a strong security posture right from the development stage. This is complemented by the use of robust encryption mechanisms that safeguard sensitive information from breaches.
Kubernetes Policies with Kyverno
Kyverno policies are essential for automating Kubernetes resource management. These policies enable users to validate, mutate, and generate resource configurations automatically, simplifying Kubernetes management by automating policy enforcement, ensuring configurations align with organizational standards, and improving operational efficiency.
Kyverno enforces cloud-native best practices by providing a framework for defining and enforcing security, compliance, and operational policies as code. This helps improve container security posture by implementing security policies that enforce best practices, including restricting the use of privileged containers to ensure your image signatures are verified and enforcing resource limits like CPU or memory quotas. Kyverno allows users to apply predefined or custom policy sets aimed at improving container security posture and continuous compliance.
These features allow Kyverno to automatically handle the enforcement of best practices, helping organizations maintain a secure, compliant, and efficient Kubernetes environment.
Data Resilience Guardrails with Kasten and Kyverno
By leveraging Kyverno policies, we can extend Kasten’s ability to secure and scale data with the help of specific strategies. These policies notably improve the control and management of your Kubernetes resources. In this section, we’ll review key examples of Kyverno policies you should consider implementing and explain how they contribute to your data protection goals. All policies listed below can be found at Kyverno’s website.
Streamlining data security operations: The “generate gold backup policy” is tailored for any deployment or StatefulSet that incorporates the labels “dataprotection: k10-goldpolicy”. This policy allows you to determine data protection objectives and facilitate backup assignments via application labels. Furthermore, “generate Kasten policy from preset” generates a brand-new Kasten policy for namespaces that contain a valid “dataprotection” label if the policy doesn’t already exist. For best results, this should be used in harmony with the “kasten-validate-ns-by-preset-label” policy which necessitates “dataprotection” labeling for new namespaces.
Anticipating and preventing threats: The most important policies that allow you to be proactive and avoid disaster is implimenting policies that will keep your data safe, protected, and immutable. The “check Kasten location profile is immutable” policy blocks deleterious changes by guaranteeing that Kasten location profiles have immutability enabled, thereby preventing harmful changes to backup data.
Drawing on the wisdom of the 3-2-1 rule of data protection, the “check Kasten 3-2-1 backup policy” encourages maintaining at least three copies of data, stored on two distinct targets, with one stored offsite. Our policy furthers this strategy by validating that every policy contains both ‘action: backup’ and ‘action: export’ to ensure effective redundancy for data recovery in the event of local or multi-region cloud failure.
Finally, the “check Kasten policy RPO based on namespace label”policy supports adherence to recovery point objective (RPO) best practices. By checking if a policy is set to run hourly for namespaces containing the appPriority=critical label, it ensures critical response efforts are prioritized. This policy can be customized to enforce Kasten policy requirements based on various namespace labels, aligning protection objectives with the specific needs of the application.
Ensuring compliance and longevity: With cloud-native environments ever changing and new microservices and applications introduced, its critical to set policies that ensure compliance and can scale as your company grows. The “minimum backup retention” policy helps assure longevity and adherence to compliance retention standards. By customizing this policy, you can enforce your chosen regulation standards based on the Grandfather-Father-Son (GFS) retention scheme. Additionally, by adjusting retention lengths, this policy can help with cost optimization and aligning financial goals with your data preservation needs.
Moreover, the “validate data protection with Kasten preset label” policy ensures every new namespace includes a label that references a valid Kasten service level agreement (SLA) for data protection. It can work in conjunction with the kasten-generate-policy-by-preset-label ClusterPolicy to auto-create a Kasten policy based on a specific SLA. This combination enhances data security, circumvents the risk of leaving new applications unprotected, and boosts overall data protection efficiency.
Summary
The combination of Kasten and Kyverno offers a robust solution for achieving true data resilience and rigorous security in cloud-native applications. By leveraging Kasten’s data management platform and Kyverno’s policy enforcement capabilities, businesses can customize, manage, and scale their cloud-native applications while ensuring top-notch security and data resilience. This integration empowers organizations to maintain the flexibility and agility of their Kubernetes environment without compromising on safety and reliability. With Kasten and Kyverno, businesses can streamline data security operations through automation and implementing best practices for data resilience, ultimately fostering a more secure, compliant, and efficient Kubernetes environment.
If you’re ready to get started, check out this tutorial on how to implement a Kyverno policy with Kasten here.