Friday, February 03, 2023

Project Velero, an open source data protection framework for cloud-native workloads

During the recent 48th edition of The IT Press Tour, we had the opportunity to have a session on Project Velero at Red Hat office in Sunnyvale.

Velero is an open source tool that offers data protection, migration and DR for cloud-native workloads orchestrated by Kubernetes. And as enterprises move more and more to these Kubernetes controlled environments, it clearly become a must have, whatever the deployment model is on-premises or public clouds.

I mentioned the location of the meeting as this project is a joint effort from several active vendors such Dell, Kasten, Microsoft, Red Hat and VMware by alpha order. The web site of the project indicated clearly that the project is backed by VMware but when we checked the page pointed http://vmware.github.io/ then https://github.com/vmware/, we didn't find any project name velero. Of course on the main Github page, the search of Velero gave results. This link should be updated.


Velero comes from Heptio, it was the Ark product there, a Seattle-based company acquired by VMware end of 2018.

Already mentioned above, Velero mission is to protect stateful information within a Kubernetes cluster such etcd and persistent volumes. The difficulty in a distributed environment is to be sure everything is consistent, I should say frozen at the same time, to have a real point-in-time view of the entire application environment. This is really difficult and it represents a classic theoretical challenge to solve.


Velero has 3 components: a Velero server in the cluster, a CLI client and a Restic deamonset in the cluster as well. Velero relies on the Kubernetes API server to manage correctly etcd data and also cloud provider snapshot but also it could be a file system backup with Restic for instance, then use a data mover function to copy these data to an external object storage for backup images persistence. 

We understand that Velero is used by several key vendors such Veritas with NetBackup, Dell with PowerProtect, VMware, Red Hat and a few others.

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