Heptio and Microsoft collaborate to bring Heptio Ark to Azure
Today we are announcing a collaboration with Microsoft to make Heptio Ark a strong Kubernetes disaster recovery solution for Microsoft Azure. We will also collaborate to make the Ark project an efficient way to move Kubernetes applications between on-premise computing environments and Azure, and to ensure that Azure-hosted backups are secure.
We launched the Heptio Ark project earlier this year to provide a production-grade solution for cluster disaster recovery. Working through the Kubernetes API, Ark builds a snapshot of the user’s intent, rather than attempting to rely on low-level in-flight information recovered from etcd (the underlying data store for Kubernetes). This will deliver the flexibility as the tool matures to restore state in new clusters that are fundamentally different from the clusters where the state originated — they could be in a different region or indeed in a totally different environment. You can do this with stateless applications today and we are also working to provide the ability to migrate stateful workloads between environments. More about that in the future.
This capability unlocks some interesting uses of the project: Ark is more than a backup/recovery tool. It is a useful way to move workloads from one environment to another. Early users have also enjoyed the ability to replicate a cluster, or a portion of a cluster, for experimentation purposes. Being able to faithfully reproduce a production environment for upgrade or staging purposes is incredibly powerful.
With the Heptio-Microsoft collaboration, we will be working together to bring the power of the full scope of Heptio Ark to Microsoft Azure — ensuring that organizations can not only backup and restore content into Azure Container Service (AKS), but that snapshots created using Ark are persisted in Azure and are encrypted at rest.
The design of the Ark project is modular and extensible, allowing for easy integration into a broad array of environments. We have been working with our friends in the community to make it easy to build plug-ins for various cloud providers. We are collectively committed to the vision that staying as close as possible to the upstream Kubernetes project presents the best way to meet the needs of businesses in the emerging multi-cloud world, and to ensure that Kubernetes provides a strong framework that decouples applications from the specifics of the infrastructure that hosts them.
It is still early days for the Ark project, but we are excited to have the opportunity to work within the growing Kubernetes ecosystem to solve real problems and realize the broader vision of the framework.
If you are interested in learning more about Ark, please visit our community page at http://github.com/heptio/ark.
