Key Criteria for Evaluating Kubernetes Data Protection

An Evaluation Guide for Technology Decision Makers

Published April 2022

This GigaOm report is one of a series of documents that helps IT organizations assess competing solutions in the context of well-defined features and criteria.

Enterprise IT organizations are embracing new DevOps methodologies and promoting the development of applications architected as microservices. This has led to the adoption of containers and the use of Kubernetes to deploy and manage these applications.

However, as these containerized cloud-native applications moved to production and became more important and even mission-critical, organizations discovered critical limitations in day-2 operations around data storage and data protection. In fact, in the beginning, container and Kubernetes enthusiasts underestimated the importance of persistent and reliable data storage. Though the problem was recognized a while ago, the development of solutions capable of properly addressing data storage and data protection for Kubernetes took some time. In some cases, solutions are still immature. Moreover, traditional (virtual machine-based) data protection methods have been inefficient and ineffective.