Kanister: Application-Aware Data Management on Kubernetes
Shriira Press
How Kanister turns the hard problem of backing up stateful applications on Kubernetes into reusable, application-aware Blueprints.
Welcome to Kanister: Application-Aware Data Management on Kubernetes.
Kanister is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation sandbox project, originally built by the team behind Veeam Kasten, that tackles one of the most stubborn problems in cloud-native operations: protecting the data of real, stateful applications. A volume snapshot can capture bytes on a disk, but it cannot guarantee that a database flushed its buffers, quiesced its writes, or recorded a transactionally consistent point in time. Kanister closes that gap by letting domain experts encode application-specific data operations — backup, restore, migration, and more — as declarative Blueprints made of ordered Phases, then run them through a Kubernetes controller using ActionSets and Profiles. This book starts with the problem and the idea of application consistency, walks through the architecture and the controller, then unpacks each building block: Blueprints, Kanister functions, ActionSets, Profiles, the Go-template parameter system, and the kanctl and kando tools. It closes with how teams actually adopt Kanister and where it sits in the wider data-protection ecosystem.
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