Companies tag team Heptio Ark project
Austin, Texas — Microsoft and Heptio announced at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2017 they are working together to ensure the Heptio Ark project provides a Kubernetes disaster recovery solution for customers wanting to use it on Azure. The companies collaboration will revolve around making the Ark project an ideal solution for migrating Kubernetes applications across on-premise environments and Azure, and to ensure the security of Azure-hosted backups.
Heptio is a Seattle-based startup founded in 2016 by Craig McLuckie and Joe Beda, along with Brendan Burns, who originally developed Kubernetes while at Google. Heption and Microsoft Azure will work to ensure backup and restore content in Azure Container Service (AKS), and the snapshots created with Ark persist in Azure and are encrypted at rest.
Since its release in 2015, Kubernetes has become the de facto standard for container orchestration and management. The open source platform enables users to deploy the same software server stack across public clouds like Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform. With Kubernetes, developers can launch container clusters with advanced cloud native features, while IT administrators handle an organization’s cloud providers and data centers through a single interface.
“Few real-world companies live solely in the public cloud,” said McLuckie. “It is incredibly important that the tools and practices they adopt when selecting their public cloud services work on-premises as well. Microsoft’s commitment to working with the open source community will not only benefit Azure customers, but strengthens the Kubernetes community.”
As part of the collaboration, Microsoft will provide the Ark service in AKS along with customer support. Heptio will offer service and support, in addition to software for overseeing Kubernetes environments, to customers attempting to run instances of Ark and Kubernetes on unmanaged infrastructure.
“I’m excited to see Heptio and Microsoft deliver a compelling solution that satisfies an important and unmet need in the Kubernetes ecosystem,” said Burns, now at Microsoft. “We’re working with Heptio to ensure that the integration of Ark and Azure is a best-of-breed solution for backing up on-premise Kubernetes clusters into the cloud.”
