Announcing Backup for GKE: the easiest way to protect GKE workloads

Organizations everywhere have been choosing to build on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), driven by benefits like higher developer productivity and lower infrastructure costs. And one of the fastest growing GKE architectures is the deployment of stateful workloads like relational databases, inside GKE containers. Stateful workloads have additional requirements over stateless workloads, including the need for data protection and storage management.

Today, we are announcing the Preview for Backup for GKE, a simple, cloud-native way for you to protect, manage, and restore your containerized applications and data. With Backup for GKE, you can more easily meet your service-level objectives, automate common backup and recovery tasks, and show reporting for compliance and audit purposes. 

Best of all, this means more applications deployed in GKE, making it easier for our largest customers, like Broadcom, to expand their use of GKE and manage these new, more demanding workloads. Google Cloud is the first cloud provider to offer a simple, first-party backup for Kubernetes.

“Backup for GKE makes it easier for us to protect our stateful workloads in GKE, and it makes restoring those stateful workloads much simpler and faster,” said Jose Chavez, SaaS Platform and Delivery Engineer at Broadcom. “We see integrated backup as another sign of GKE’s maturity for stateful workloads, and we look forward to using it to serve our worldwide internal customers at Broadcom.”

Protecting containers: how Backup for GKE works

Prior to Backup for GKE, many GKE customers backed up their stateful application data separately from GKE cluster state data. Application data could be protected via a storage-based backup, while cluster state data might be captured occasionally using custom scripts and stored in a separate customer bucket. Customers with ongoing backup requirements relied on homegrown solutions to perform regular backups and to demonstrate compliance. In the event of a restore, customers had to perform more complex orchestration. Storage management tasks, like creating a clone for testing purposes, or migrating data from one cluster to another, meant additional operational overhead.

Backup for GKE orchestrates data protection and restores for you, so that you can manage data at the container level. With Backup for GKE, you can create a backup plan to schedule periodic backups of both application data and GKE cluster state data. You can also restore each backup to a cluster in the same region or, alternately, to a cluster in a different region. You can even customize your backups to ensure application consistency for the most demanding, tier-one database workloads. The result is a feature that drives down the operational cost for infrastructure teams at companies like Atos, while also making it easier for architects and developers to use GKE for their most critical applications.

"Over the past several months, we have been impressed by Backup for GKE and how it reduces our operational workload when protecting GKE clusters," said Jaroslaw Gajewski, Digital Cloud Services Lead Architect and Distinguished Expert at Atos. "This feature supports our continued adoption of infrastructure-as-code as part of Digital Cloud Services landing zones delivery with our joint customers and, more importantly, ensures that we can deliver the demanding service levels our customers require to run mission-critical applications."

Another sign of GKE maturity and momentum

Integrated, first-party backup functionality has long been a milestone for leading infrastructure software vendors on their way to mass adoption. Relational database vendors delivered their first-party backup tools over twenty years ago, and hypervisor vendors followed up with standardized backup APIs over ten years ago. Today, GKE’s first-party backup offering is ready for our customers.

We’re thrilled that more organizations are turning to GKE for more of their mission-critical workloads, including stateful applications. Our team has worked hard to deliver the best Kubernetes service for all workloads, and we’re energized by what our customers have created on our platform. We invite everyone interested in simplifying your backup and storage management tasks to sign up for the Preview of Backup for GKE.

To sign up for the Backup for GKE Preview, please reach out to your account team or contact our sales representatives. If you are interested in learning more about how customers are using GKE for Backup and other new Google Cloud storage capabilities, be sure to register for our webinar, Explore What's New with Storage at Google Cloud, scheduled for October 6, and for Google Cloud Next ‘21, scheduled for October 12-14.