With Red Hat’s OpenShift becoming increasingly popular, the need to protect deployments in the production environment becomes ever more important. It is recommended that as soon as enterprises begin working with OpenShift that a reputable backup solution be found.
Why backup an OpenShift Environment?
The re-imagining of what a container and a virtual machine are is increasing the popularity of Red Hat’s OpenShift. A new approach to containerization, as what is offered by OpenShift is exciting, however, existing realities still need to be considered. The reality is that deployments in an OpenShift environment still need a comprehensive data protection policy. Deployments are still subject to data protection laws and best practices. Applications that are reliant on stateful data are no different, so to remain compliant and ensure data is protected OpenShift deployments need to be backed up.
While the above reality is exactly that, backing up OpenShift data poses several unique challenges. Given that the very nature of OpenShift embraces flexibility and modularity any backup solution will need to account for this. Ideally, the chosen solution will need to be able to handle data migration as well as back up data from the cloud and more traditional environments. As an added cherry on the take, being able to automate the backup process will simplify matters greatly for staff and prevent future errors.
Backup and Restore Considerations
OpenShift does come with a Backup and Restore utility, however, the needs of enterprises often need a more holistic solution that covers several technologies. Having an enterprise-level backup solution is one method of covering all your bases. When choosing an OpenShift backup solution there are several mission-critical questions to answer. These are:
- Importantly, and an obvious point but does bear mentioning, does the solution safeguard OpenShift clusters?
- Can the solution take snapshots of data storage containers?
- Do these snapshots allow for efficient backup, data replication, and migration?
- Does the application allow for the recovery of applications and persistent data?
- Can the solution restore persistent volumes to the local directory?
- Can clusters be redeployed fats and efficiently?
- Can secure configurations be restored to the same state as before?
- Does it have an easy-to-use interface?
Thee requirements are by far not the easiest to meet, but some providers can do exactly as mentioned above. Given the wide list of requirements, a great interface cannot be underestimated as it will make utilizing your chosen solution far easier. Red Hat has also certified several backup solutions so that users can be confident that the solution integrates with their OpenShift environments, so it is advised that the chosen solution is also Red Hat certified.
Conclusion
The development of containerization has moved far beyond a tool for developers to play with and offers enterprises exciting new opportunities on how to develop applications and handle data to better support customers. With new and exciting technology the need for data protection is made even more important as disasters new and old can still happen.
