Daniel Nashed's Blog

Kubernetes Snapshot Support -- Is anyone using it in production today?

I am currently looking into the best way to backup applications on Kubernetes and ran into kasten.io (shortname: K10) which is now owned by Veeam ( https://www.kasten.io/ )

K10 is well done and easy to install. But you will need storage supporting snapshots.
There are a couple of provides supported native and they also support native CSI drivers with snapshot functionality.
K10 is free for up to 10 applications. So I am currently using the free version to explore integration options.


ZFS Snapshots

OpenZFS natively supports snapshots. This is the first logical step to look into for me.

On CentOS 8.4 I had to compile the OpenZFS kernel driver from the sources.
Once I found our what the latest version it was straightforward ( https://openzfs.org ).


CSI Driver for ZFS

On top of it I needed the OpenEBS driver for K8s (https://openebs.io/blog/snapshot-and-clone-for-zfs-localpv/ )

Now I have CentOS 8.4 + ZFS + OpenEBS + K3s (https://k3s.io/ ) with snapshot storage + K10 from Kasten for testing container snapshots.

In parallel I am looking into native container snapshots on command line and K8s API.
This looks like an interesting combination to backup applications either way.
K10 really hides the complexity and makes it easy with a graphical interface.
But the underlaying snapshot technology in K8s is available native in K8s in the current versions --> https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/storage/volume-snapshots/

[ Disclaimer about ZFS ]
You should note that ZFS has not been tested by HCL for Domino.
I posted before about ZFS and it looks like some customers are using it.
The only known issue is that you cannot use translog optimized block size alignment enabled by create_r85_log=1 which still causes Domino V12 to crash.

Other CSI Storage drivers

Using k3s the Longhorn storage ( https://longhorn.io/  ) could be also a good choice.
I saw installation instructions for k3s. But I don't want more moving parts for now..
The beauty is that once you have a CSI Storage driver, all the snapshot operations are transparent and the details are hidden behind the APIs.

Your Feedback?

I would be very interested to hear if anyone looked into this before or even is using it in production.
Of course my background is always Domino. So my ultimate goal would be to have snapshot integration for Domino as an application..
I have all the building blocks ready to go including invoking snapshots from the K8s API.

• Is there anyone out there using snapshots?
  
• What type of storage do you use?
  
• Type of environment you are using?
  
  

Daniel

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