Data management platform Kasten K10 v2.5 is now available, introducing a cloud native transformation framework which is meant to improve backup and mobility for Kubernetes applications.

K10 is meant to offer businesses “an easy-to-use, scalable, and secure system for backup/restore, disaster recovery, and mobility of Kubernetes applications” with automatic application discovery, policy-driven automation, and compliance monitoring. The mobility part mainly consists of offering help in moving applications across namespaces, clusters, accounts or clouds, while backup capabilities also include options for granular restores.

Starting with the new version, K10 will fit every application with a data transformation engine in a bid to make data transformations faster and less error prone. While the latter is a consequence of the smaller fault domains this approach offers, speed can for example be improved through parallel transfers.

The system was built following some key principles, which include that users are free to choose a storage approach per app, and the isolation of the fault, security, and update domain.

Other aims were the ability to horizontally scale up/down in serverless environments instead of following a peak-demand oriented, more vertical method, and being Kubernetes native which boils down to using the tool in order to ensure high availability and scalability.

Along with the data transformation engine comes one for application transformations which is meant to up the game on application portability. According to the announcement post, this can only be “truly enabled” by handling transformations across infrastructure, Kubernetes environments (production to test for example), and application specifications.

To realise this, the newly added application transformation engine apparently treats all the microservices, storage elements, and objects (such as secrets) that make up a Kubernetes application as a unit when applying transforms. 

Those are similar to JSON patches in that they use transform documents containing transform commands to be performed – in sequence – on a subject. Transform operations the engine is capable of range from test, copy, add and move to replace, and can for example be useful for platform migration.

K10 is available as a subscription service for enterprise use with pricing available on request, and a free version with a limited number of worker nodes and support on “best effort basis” only.