CloudCasa by Catalogic
CloudCasa is a software-as-a-service solution for backing up, restoring, and securing Kubernetes-based applications. The SaaS service is hosted on AWS and operates on Kubernetes, but it can also be self-hosted upon request. It’s available in both public cloud application catalogs and Rancher’s application catalog, making adoption easier. It uses a freemium concept with capacity-based payment. Customers can back up Kubernetes resource metadata to CloudCasa for free, as well as manage PV (CSI and EBS) and RDS snapshots with a 30-day retention duration. Customers must pay if they want immutable backup repositories enabled, or if they want to save PV backup data in CloudCasa-managed backup repositories, which the firm claims are given “at cost” of the object storage provided.
Users can back up up to 100GB of PV snapshots to CloudCasa for free, and pricing for 1TB of cloud storage starts at $199 per month. CloudCasa repositories provide free restores with no additional egress fees.
CloudCasa establishes a gRPC connection between an agent in its own namespace and its SaaS components from customer clusters, and then conducts the CSI data processing as CRDs inside those customer clusters, deployable via kubectl, Helm charts, or as Operators.
Its primary customers are developers and DevOps engineers who are familiar with data protection but not experts in it, making it simple to integrate data protection into their day-to-day workflows and removing the heavy lifting of deploying and administering the data protection solution’s lifecycle.
CloudCasa is heavily invested in the Kubernetes ecosystem, supporting a variety of Kubernetes-based platforms such as Azure AKS, AWS EKS, GKE, and DigitalOcean, as well as OpenShift, Rancher, Tanzu, and others. CloudCasa also supports backing up services in the AWS ecosystem, such as RDS and Aurora-based databases, EKS metadata, and EBS-based snapshot storage.
CloudCasa not only supports bring-your-own backup repositories (which work with any S3-compatible target, including on-premises appliances, and they’re working on a certification program for most common on-premises and public cloud object stores), but it also offers a flexible selection of Azure and AWS object storage locations, including across the globe. Bring-your-own-keys will be supported in the future for any backup repository.
They allow data-at-rest and in-flight encryption for any repository, as well as immutability (called SafeLock), which prevents backups from being destroyed and retention policies from being compromised by cryptolocker attempts.
Autodetection of CSI and EBS-based PVs is supported by CloudCasa. AWS accounts are also inventoried by CloudCasa in order to detect newly introduced EKS clusters. It allows you to back up apps using labels, namespaces, and rules.
Some of CloudCasa’s security features, such as container, networking, configuration, and best practices benchmark scanning, are still in early access. These features will analyze AWS services, including AWS IAM, EKS, KMS, S3, RDS, VPC, and more, for misconfigurations and security vulnerabilities.
The “AWS well-architected” accreditation, on the other hand, means that its SaaS service complies with AWS’ stringent security, efficiency, and reliability requirements, such as multifactor authentication for the SaaS Web UI, suspicious IP throttling, fraud and brute force attack detection, and SOC2/ISO27001 compliance.
Pre- and post-backup scripts are used to create consistent backups for a variety of databases, including quiescing or stunning MySQL, MongoDB, and PostgreSQL databases with pre-built templates. In the future, the business intends to provide more templates for popular data services, such as git-based source version control systems.
Users must employ backup and restore workflows to transfer apps or data services between platforms in order to use application migration functionality. As a result, CloudCasa isn’t ideal for lift-and-shift migrations, application transformation, or cloud migration scenarios.
It recently includes features that allow for heterogeneous restores between multiple storage classes, mapping of different storage classes inside the CSI and EBS realms, and DR-to-the-cloud migration scenarios.
Finally, its web-based UI lacks RBAC and self-service options for restricting access to specific clusters or namespaces by specific individuals or groups. Users can see all resources when they are added to their accounts, but there is no method for them to delegate access, and there is no ability to manage many users using the organization concept for delegation. In 2022, CloudCasa plans to offer the first version of RBAC functionality.
Strengths: CloudCasa is a free, feature-rich data backup solution that supports Kubernetes clusters as well as AWS services like RDS.
It offers AWS support for backing up cloud-native databases and wants to expand its connection with AWS, Azure, DigitalOcean, and Google Cloud Platform.
Challenges: Because CloudCasa isn’t an application migration solution, it’s not ideal for application transformation initiatives right now (and cross-cluster or DR-to-the-cloud scenarios). It is less suitable for enterprise contexts with stronger compliance and security needs because to its poor support for developer self-service and RBAC. CloudCasa is concentrating on expanding its AWS capabilities, but it presently lacks the same support for Azure and GCP.