Veritas at KubeCon 2022: Multi-Cloud and Multi-Region Availability

It was a whirlwind couple of days at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2022, but connecting with developers and cloud-native companies together to learn and plan for cloud-native computing. It was a broad mix of industries connecting and learning how to utilize and, most importantly, protect containers.

Specifically, Veritas was the sponsor for the SecurityCon reception which was a fun happy hour after the first day of events. It brought together all the co-located events to network, connect, and commiserate over current problems they are facing in container development. This was day one of what was to be a long week of container conversations and a happy hour was a perfect way to end it.

Throughout the SecurityCon reception, one of the most common questions we heard was: "How can I protect my applications in a multi-cloud or multi-region manner?" As we see more companies develop directly in the cloud, there remains a need to stay ahead of potential disasters. Whether they are natural disasters or man-made mistakes, we have seen news of applications and stream services going down for hours while issues are diagnosed between the application owners and their cloud providers. The upsurge in new K8s adoption means organizations must build well-configured architectures to maintain protection and resilience. Building applications from the ground up utilizing K8s is the perfect time to architect these resiliency features and plan for the eventual outage.

Let’s be honest: the name of the game is availability! You want to make sure your applications are accessible, no matter where your users (or customers) are located, no matter where your company is developing and no matter what is currently happening with political regulations where your data is stored.

That's where Veritas comes in. We empower DevOps teams with the only agnostic, enterprise-level data management platform that helps you manage hundreds of architecture layers across any storage environment—whether on-premises or in the cloud.

Availability Use Cases

Let’s look at some of the use cases that came up during the SecurityCon reception discussions and maybe that will help you understand a little bit about how you can drive resiliency across deployments.

Multi-Cloud Availability

Most organizations are spread across major cloud providers; with recent Veritas research showing a majority of the respondents are using more than one cloud provider, with around a third were using four or more! In addition, sixty-nine percent of respondents said they have increased the number of Kubernetes-based containerized workloads in the past two years. These expanding cloud environments are leading to more issues with security and complexity, as they have more cloud environments and containers to monitor.

One cloud architect’s use case stood out to me as they are not yet containerized, but was at the conference to learn more about how others in a similar industry to improve the stability of their organization’s new streaming platform. Currently, they launched the streaming service on Azure but struggle to manually keep scripts and data in sync between the production and DR environment. Not only that, but was looking for ways to be able to have a standby version of their application on another cloud in the event that Azure were to go down. Veritas Availability solutions can keep applications up and running whether running in a container or not.

Multi-Regional Availability

Another part of that conversation was the need for synchronized regional availability for an entertainment service provider. This specific service provider was in the early stages of rolling out a streaming platform that was created in the cloud. As many IT admins reading this know, the first iteration of any application isn’t perfect, but the directive is to get it up and running! To do this, the provider used a combination of K8s and persistent VM’s. One item that kept coming up during planning sessions for the streaming platform was “how do I ensure that our application stays up during a cloud outage?” This is especially important because compared to the rest of the industry, this streaming platform is a bit late out of the gate and any outage would incur a reputation and brand risk. The solution that this provider architected was to build another instance of the application in another cloud region. This is a great solution to ensure continuity of services in the event one region has an outage, but the architects quickly found a flaw in that design. Whenever a change is made in production, how does that change get replicated to the other region’s persistent servers? The obvious solution, and the one that this specific provider went with, was to create scripts to synchronize the changes. But this presented its own set of problems. How often do you replicate? Which user account does the replication? What happens if the script does not run? Who gets alerted to any replication issues? 
 
The main use case for the reference architecture was for Veritas Availability solutions and how companies can keep their applications available throughout their coverage region as well as through an outage when application developers utilize containers as well as traditional VM’s. In essence, utilize Veritas as a content delivery network and keep items synchronized worldwide.

Chart a better K8s course with Veritas

At Veritas, we know that DevOps teams are critical to delivering great software and services. That's why we've created our platform from the ground up with their needs in mind: it's fast, flexible, and easy to use. As an added benefit, it supports virtually any type of cloud infrastructure—including Amazon Web Services (AWS), VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Whether it is multi-cloud, multi-region, or a combination of concerns, Veritas has been addressing the challenges that come with the protection and availability of applications in a Kubernetes environment. My colleague Ryan Behiel wrote about the work we have been doing over the last year so that you can run containers with confidence. Additionally, he has created demonstrations of our software-defined storage and data protection.

For more information about how Veritas can support your containerized environment, see our Kubernetes solutions page, and we look forward to continuing these conversations at next year’s KubeCon events.