 Hello, folks. Kubernetes has become a go-to environment for running your applications, and they also store a lot of the mission critical data, obviously, in these clusters. So it becomes, obviously, very important to have that data protected and measures in place for such applications. Now, in this video, we will go through and have a look on how you can achieve this with Microsoft Azure. Today I have the pleasure that I'm joined by Rashad, Senior PM in the Azure BCDR team, who will tell us more about how you can protect your Azure Kubernetes service or AKS clusters. Welcome, Rashad. Great to have you on today. Thanks, Thomas. Great to have you in here and me there and helping out customers tell them how they can protect their AKS clusters today. Awesome. So, Rashad, customers are increasingly using AKS to run their applications on Azure. Can you tell us why backup is critical and how this can be achieved with Azure backup today? So Azure Kubernetes service has become a default platform for customers right now to running their containers. Customers have usually been using AKS for running stateless, but storing state in those clusters has become a key thing now. Customers are running databases like MySQL, Postgres, MongoDB, relational, New Age, Cloud Database, everything is now being run inside Kubernetes. And the key thing when you're running a database is to store that data and back it up, so in case you can have any kind of a failure, deletion, something like that or any mishap happens, you have your backup to protect you. So backup basically backs you up. And that's why the key thing comes in for AKS also is to have a data protection product in line. And taking that approach, we in Azure backup, we built our AKS backup solution. The focus that we built on to is around app centricity, that's the key in Kubernetes, that's what we focus on. Customers get like a set of filtering capabilities which allows them to identify what they want to back it up in their AKS clusters like namespaces, labels and all from coming from the Kubernetes world, they can do it. And then they can easily backup not just the data that's stored, but the other application state that's there, we call it cluster state in Kubernetes or in that they can also protect. So all in all, customer can encompass, define what's their application is and pack it up on a regular basis. And then with Azure backup being there, they get all the additional facilities that's going to come along, that may be long term retention, monitoring and governance capabilities that they need. And then they also get ransomware protection on the line. So all these features are in place that customers need in backup solutions for the AKS also. That's awesome. That's awesome to hear especially what AKS backup now can do for our customers. So you talked about application centric approach, right? And I think we do that a lot, especially now these days, when it comes to Azure and the cloud. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Yeah. So fundamentally, when we talk about app centricity in Kubernetes world, that's the basic tenant on which Kubernetes was built to basically keeping aside the application deployment and development process, separate from infrastructure as in case, that's how Kubernetes has been built. And that's what the key part of backup is you're not looking to predict the infra on which you're running your application. You're trying to predict the app in itself. And that's what we talk about, app centricity in Kubernetes. And I'm going to quickly just do a demo for you how you can configure backup and highlight to you how the app centric approach comes into picture for AKS backup. So this is here. I have a generic AKS cluster running. It has a WordPress app deployed in it. So I'm just going to show it to you quickly where the app is as in case. So app is deployed within namespaces in the AKS world. And that's where it's a logical boundary as in case. So it's a WordPress app that you can see there's a MySQL database running it and a WordPress application also running within this cluster. And that's what I'm going to look to protect. So first thing that we have done in context of experience files in itself, you get your backup inbuilt within the AKS portal. It means the experience that is there for Kubernetes in Azure. Just get it there so you can manage your backup directly from here. And you can, the entire experience basically lies in the same platform. Now with this coming up, I'll show you how you can do a backup, how it works and what the app centric approach may talk about will cover picture. So first I'll select a vault. Vault is the key component in Azure backup world. That's the management layer for us in context of backup. So that's here. I'll move forward. And then I'll do something in the next step that is called creating a policy. What is a backup policy? It's something in which you define the schedule and retention of your backup. In the backup world, it becomes key to have a specific RPO in order to even trying to back it up. So you can do it in here. So I'll just quickly create a backup policy here. And I'll define the schedule and retention under this policy. You can see I can schedule backups for hourly basis. Every four hours I can back up my AKS cluster. I can do a backup daily basis. And then I can retain each backup from seven days to an year as per my requirement. So that is available in the AKS backup. Now quickly this policy once it's created, then I can move forward and basically configure the actual application and define what it would look like. So this is where I came from. And now I'll define the application. So first I'll name the app name, let me name it WordPress. And because I'm backing it up, let me instead of backup. As I talked about the namespace being the logical boundary Kubernetes world, you have an option to pick up which particular thing that you want to back it up. And here I want to back up my WordPress app. So I'm just going to pick it up. What else do I have in here? You have labels. Labels are basically tags that you provide within your application components and Kubernetes. You can use them. What it allows is that you can pick and choose specific resources within your cluster, including secrets and all. You can also add app customization by writing some pre-post hooks. Hooks are basically certain commands that you need to run as part of your backup. And then you can have application consistent backups. They are very crucial in the databases world, like MySQL MongoDB, that's where they come in handy. And that's what is also available. So that's how you have defined in my app boundary as it is. I picked up a namespace, I can use labels, I can pick and choose some particular resources and all I can do that. And after that, I need to select a snapshot resource. This is where the backups get stoned. You can run the validation and my backup will proceed for this particular scenario. So that's how you can define an app boundary within AKS backup and basically back up your application. As in case I have already created a backup configured one for this cluster, which you can see it here. It's an entire cluster backup. In AKS backup, you get an option to back up your entire cluster and even any changes comes into future will automatically get backed up. So you don't need to worry about it. So that's also comes in. You have a recovery point already in place. So this is how backup can be configured for an AKS cluster and the app centric approach that I defined right now comes into flow. Awesome. Like that, making the life of application admins that much easier, that's obviously the goal. So obviously we discussed a bit like, okay, we have these stateless and stateful apps, and so there's different scenarios. Can you tell me in which scenarios backup really can help customers? What are the scenarios where backups will come in handy? Yeah, so backups are crucial thing in a stateful scenario. That means when I say stateful, a data is being stored inside the AKS cluster. It becomes very important that you have backups in place and how backups help at that point of a time. What if we basically dropped a table in the database that you're running, and then how are you going to bring that data up if it's in production environment? There's no way to get it. So at that point of a time, AKS backup comes in handy. You have your data backed up, you can just restore it, and then you can have your tables backed up to a particular time in the past where the table existed. Do that simply for that. Then new scenarios coming up, their backup becomes handy is something like application migration. So I want to upgrade my Kubernetes cluster. Kubernetes every six, 12 months brings out a new version. AKS also upgrade with that. So if as a customer, I want to upgrade my cluster to move to a newer version of Kubernetes, I can use backup then. One of the big scenarios that's around is application migration. I want to move my application from one cluster to another cluster. There's another key scenario that comes in is what if I have a bug in production, I want to fix it. But what I need to do is that I need to clone my production environment, move into a test environment, test out the bug, and then redeploy it. In every single place that you have the scenarios that are when that's where backup comes in handy, because then you can use backup, not just as backup for your deleted data, but for newer scenarios like migrating your application from one cluster to another, DevOps related experiences that you have, or you want to do an app upgrade or cluster upgrade. So everything comes in handy. So it's not just one, but multiple use cases comes in with backup. In terms of experience part of it, even the restore experience that we have built in Thomas is app centric for AKS backup. So as I showed you, this is the backup that I have right now. And what I'll do is that I'll just quickly do a restore experience also. This is the recovery point or basically a backup that I had taken earlier for this cluster. And what I'm going to do is that I'm just going to restore it. So I'll start the restore flow. So I can simply select multiple restore points right now. There's just one. So I'm just showing it that I can have options of multiple restore points available. I can select the Kubernetes cluster that I want to use. So let me I want to use, okay, here's my cluster. And then what I'm going to show is the app centric approach within the restore flow also. So similar to you have seen that backup configuration, same thing comes in restore also, that's the cool part of the solution. You can pick and choose what namespace that you want to restore. Don't need to just restore all of them. I can decide that okay, I just want to restore my WordPress app. I can do that or maybe another component out of it I can do that. Even within those namespaces, you still have much deeper options to filter out and restore. So you have labels, API groups, these are more Kubernetes components that are there. You can use them to define what particular items within your backup that you want to restore. I talked about the application migration scenario. That's where namespace mapping kind of comes in namespace is a logical boundary for an application. Maybe I want to move my application components from one boundary to another boundary. So what I can do is that I can create an altogether the new namespace and restore the resources there and just have migrate my app from one environment to another altogether simply by just this thing. There's a little conflict handling while restoring these resources. How can manage if similar resources comes in appearance? So that also gets managed. You're going to also option to customize or restore. You can put up a simple Kubernetes CR inside the cluster and then the CR will be picked up by the backup service and then your backups also will be done. So you can have customizations also while you're performing at a store. And with this, you get your app centric approach around for AKS backup. The good thing is that that with the AKS backup being in Azure backup, you get the entire set of experience of restore also. So you can keep track of your restore jobs and all how they're performing when they're performing. So you have that option available in that case. So this is how the restore works and how you can use the restore functionality for different different user scenarios that has come along, which I mentioned earlier. Oh, this is fantastic. I love the namespace mapping. That's especially especially not just like if you want to restore obviously, but also if you do some migration or testing or you want to do different things with the real data, right? Super excited about this. And I'm sure like a lot of our viewers are also very excited about this. So where can they learn more? So you can just go to aka.ms aka cluster backup. You'll reach to our Microsoft Learn Portal. We can go through the documentation here. We have given you entire set of scenarios how you can use the product in a detailed manner and you can use our tutorials with quick learning sections and use them to start putting clusters from today itself. Awesome. Thank you very much for all this great information today and walking us through these new exciting solutions for AKS. That will help a lot our customers. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.