K10 Disaster Recovery

K10 Disaster Recovery (DR) aims to protect K10 from the underlying infrastructure failures. In particular, this feature provides the ability to recover the K10 platform in case of a variety of disasters such as the accidental deletion of K10, failure of underlying storage that K10 uses for its catalog, or even the accidental destruction of the Kubernetes cluster on which K10 is deployed.

Overview

K10 enables Disaster Recovery with the help of an internal policy to backup its own data stores and store these in an object storage bucket or an NFS file storage location configured using a Location Profile.

External Storage Configuration

To enable K10 Disaster Recovery, a Location Profile needs to be configured. This will use an object storage bucket or an NFS file storage location to store data from K10's internal data stores and the cluster will need to have write permissions to this location.

Enabling K10 Disaster Recovery

K10 Disaster Recovery settings can be accessed from the Settings icon in the top-right corner of the dashboard or, for a new install, via the prompt at the bottom of the dashboard.

From the Settings page, select K10 Disaster Recovery and then click the Enable K10 DR button to start the process.

Enabling K10 Disaster Recovery requires selecting a Location Profile for the exported K10 Disaster Recovery backups and providing a passphrase for encrypting the snapshot data. The passphrase can be provided directly or provided from a HashiCorp Vault instance if K10 is configured to access Vault.

Note

If the passphrase is provided directly, save it securely outside the cluster.

Enable Disaster Recovery by clicking on the Enable K10 DR button.

Cluster ID

A confirmation message with the cluster ID will be displayed when Disaster Recovery is enabled. This ID is used as a prefix to the object storage or NFS file storage location where K10's data store's exported backups are saved.

Note

Save the cluster ID safely, it is required to recover K10 from a disaster.

The cluster ID value can also be accessed by using the following kubectl command.

# Extract UUID of the `default` namespace
$ kubectl get namespace default -o jsonpath="{.metadata.uid}{'\n'}"

K10 Disaster Recovery Policy

A policy called k10-disaster-recovery-policy which implements K10 Disaster Recovery will automatically be created when Disaster Recovery is enabled. This policy can be viewed from the Policies page.

Click Run Once on the k10-disaster-recovery-policy to start a backup. The data exported by K10 for Disaster Recovery purposes will be encrypted via AES-256-GCM.

Warning

After enabling K10 Disaster Recovery, it is essential that you copy and save the following to successfully recover K10 from a disaster:

The cluster ID displayed on the disaster recovery page
The Disaster Recovery passphrase provided above
The credentials and object storage bucket or the NFS file storage information (used in the Location Profile configuration above)

Without this information, K10 Disaster Recovery will not be possible.

Disabling K10 Disaster Recovery

K10 Disaster Recovery can be disabled by clicking the Disable K10 DR button on the K10 Disaster Recovery settings page, which can be accessed from the Settings icon in the top-right corner of the dashboard.

Recovering K10 From a Disaster

Recovering from a K10 backup involves the following sequence of actions:

Create a Kubernetes Secret, k10-dr-secret, using the passphrase provided while enabling Disaster Recovery

Install a fresh K10 instance in the same namespace as the above Secret

Provide bucket information and credentials for the object storage location or NFS file storage location where previous K10 backups are stored

Restoring the K10 backup

Uninstalling the k10restore instance after recovery is recommended

Note

If K10 backup is stored using an NFS File Storage Location, it is important that the same NFS share is reachable from the recovery cluster and is mounted on all nodes where K10 is installed.

Specifying a Disaster Recovery Passphrase

Currently, K10 Disaster Recovery encrypts all artifacts via the use of the AES-256-GCM algorithm. The passphrase entered while enabling Disaster Recovery is used for this encryption. On the cluster used for K10 recovery, the Secret k10-dr-secret needs to be therefore created using that same passphrase. This can be done as follows in the K10 namespace (default kasten-io) after install:

$ kubectl create secret generic k10-dr-secret \
   --namespace kasten-io \
   --from-literal key=<passphrase>

The Disaster Recovery passphrase can also be provided from a HashiCorp Vault instance.

$ kubectl create secret generic k10-dr-secret \
   --namespace kasten-io \
   --from-literal source=vault \
   --from-literal vault-kv-version=<version-of-key-value-secrets-engine> \
   --from-literal vault-mount-path=<path-where-key-value-engine-is-mounted> \
   --from-literal vault-secret-path=<path-from-mount-to-passphrase-key> \
   --from-literal key=<name-of-passphrase-key>

# Example
$ kubectl create secret generic k10-dr-secret \
   --namespace kasten-io \
   --from-literal source=vault \
   --from-literal vault-kv-version=KVv1 \
   --from-literal vault-mount-path=secret \
   --from-literal vault-secret-path=k10 \
   --from-literal key=passphrase

The supported values for vault-kv-version are KVv1 and KVv2.

Note

Using a passphrase from HashiCorp Vault also requires enabling HashiCorp Vault authentication when installing the kasten/k10restore helm chart. Refer: Enabling HashiCorp Vault using Token Auth or Kubernetes Auth.

Reinstall K10

Note

If you are reinstalling K10 on the same cluster, it is important to clean up the namespace in which K10 was previously installed before the above passphrase creation.

# Delete the kasten-io namespace.
$ kubectl delete namespace kasten-io

K10 must be reinstalled before recovery. Please follow the instructions here.

Provide External Storage Configuration

Create a Location Profile with the object storage location or NFS file storage location where K10 backups are stored.

Restore K10 Backup

Requirements:

Source cluster ID

Name of Location Profile from the previous step

# Install the helm chart that creates the K10 restore job and wait for completion of the `k10-restore` job
# Assumes that K10 is installed in 'kasten-io' namespace.
$ helm install k10-restore kasten/k10restore --namespace=kasten-io \
    --set sourceClusterID=<source-clusterID> \
    --set profile.name=<location-profile-name>

For an OpenShift environment, --set scc.create=true is also required.

The restore job always restores the restore point catalog and artifact information. If the restore of other resources (options include profiles, policies, secrets) needs to be skipped, the skipResource flag can be used.

# e.g. to skip restore of profiles and policies, helm install command will be as follows:
$ helm install k10-restore kasten/k10restore --namespace=kasten-io \
    --set sourceClusterID=<source-clusterID> \
    --set profile.name=<location-profile-name> \
    --set skipResource="profiles\,policies"

If the Disaster Recovery Location Profile was configured for Immutable Backups, K10 can be restored to an earlier point in time. The protection period chosen when creating the profile dictates how far in the past the point-in-time can be. Set the pointInTime helm value to the desired time stamp.

# e.g. to restore K10 to 15:04:05 UTC on Jan 2, 2022:
$ helm install k10-restore kasten/k10restore --namespace=kasten-io \
    --set sourceClusterID=<source-clusterID> \
    --set profile.name=<location-profile-name> \
    --set pointInTime="2022-01-02T15:04:05Z"

See Immutable Backups Workflow for additional information.

Enable HashiCorp Vault using Token Auth

Create a Kubernetes secret with the Vault token.

kubectl create secret generic vault-creds \
    --namespace kasten-io \
    --from-literal vault_token=<vault-token>

Warning

This may cause the token to be stored in shell history.

Use these additional parameters when installing the kasten/k10restore helm chart.

--set vault.enabled=true \
--set vault.address=<vault-server-address> \
--set vault.secretName=<name-of-secret-with-vault-creds>

Enable HashiCorp Vault using Kubernetes Auth

Refer to Configuring Vault Server For Kubernetes Auth prior to installing the kasten/k10restore helm chart.

Use these additional parameters when installing the kasten/k10restore helm chart.

--set vault.enabled=true \
--set vault.address=<vault-server-address> \
--set vault.role=<vault-kubernetes-authentication-role_name> \
--set vault.serviceAccountTokenPath=<service-account-token-path> # optional

vault.role is the name of the Vault Kubernetes authentication role binding the K10 service account and namespace to the Vault policy.

vault.serviceAccountTokenPath is optional and defaults to /var/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount/token.

Restore K10 Backup in Air-Gapped environment

In case of air-gapped installations, it's assumed that k10offline tool is used to push the images to a private container registry. Below command can be used to instruct k10restore to run in air-gapped mode.

# Install the helm chart that creates the K10 restore job and wait for completion of the `k10-restore` job
# Assumes that K10 is installed in 'kasten-io' namespace.
$ helm install k10-restore kasten/k10restore --namespace=kasten-io \
    --set airgapped.repository=repo.example.com \
    --set sourceClusterID=<source-clusterID> \
    --set profile.name=<location-profile-name>

Cluster-Scoped Resource Recovery

Prior to recovering applications, it may be desirable to restore cluster-scoped resources. Cluster-scoped resources may be needed for cluster configuration or as part of application recovery.

Upon completion of the Disaster Recovery Restore job, go to the Applications card, hover on the Cluster-Scoped Resources card, click on the restore icon, and select a cluster restore point to recover from.

Application Recovery

Upon completion of the Disaster Recovery Restore job, go to the Applications card, select Removed under the Filter by status drop-down menu. Click restore under the application and select a restore point to recover from.

Uninstall k10restore

The K10restore instance can be uninstalled with the helm uninstall command.

# e.g. to uninstall K10restore from the kasten-io namespace
$ helm uninstall k10-restore kasten/k10restore --namespace=kasten-io

Recovering with the Operator

Recovering from a K10 backup involves the following sequence of actions:

Install a fresh K10 instance.
Configure a Location Profile from where the K10 backup will be restored.
Create a Kubernetes Secret named k10-dr-secret in the same namespace as the K10 install, with the passphrase given when disaster recovery was enabled on the previous K10 instance. The commands are detailed here.
Create a K10restore instance. The required values are
- Cluster ID - value given when disaster recovery was enabled on the previous K10 instance.
- Profile name - name of the Location Profile configured in Step 2.
and the optional values are
- Point in time - time (RFC3339) at which to evaluate restore data. Example "2022-01-02T15:04:05Z".
- Resources to skip - can be used to skip restore of specific resources. Example "profile,policies".
After recovery, deleting the k10restore instance is recommended.

Operator K10restore form view with Enable HashiCorp Vault set to False

Operator K10restore form view with Enable HashiCorp Vault set to True