Velero 1.12: Enhanced Backup and Disaster Recovery Features

Introduction

Velero 1.12, released on October 16, 2023, is most relevant if you run stateful workloads and care about predictable latency and recoverability. You’ll see the impact in storage latency under load, day-2 operations like backups/snapshots, and how quickly you can diagnose volume issues.

Enhanced CSI Snapshot Support

• CSI snapshot improvements provide better compatibility with CSI drivers and storage backends.
• Volume snapshot enhancements enable faster backup and restore operations.
• Snapshot scheduling improvements provide more flexible backup policies.
• Multi-volume support enables coordinated backup of multiple volumes.

Backup Hooks Improvements

1. Pre-backup hooks enhancements enable better application quiescing before backup.
2. Post-backup hooks improvements provide better application state restoration.
3. Hook execution reliability improvements ensure hooks execute successfully.
4. Hook monitoring enables better visibility into hook execution and failures.

Multi-Cloud Improvements

• Cloud provider integrations expand support for AWS, Azure, GCP, and other providers.
• Cross-cloud backup enables backup replication across different cloud providers.
• Migration capabilities simplify moving workloads between cloud providers.
• Provider-specific features leverage unique capabilities of each cloud provider.

Performance & Reliability

• Backup performance optimizations reduce backup time and resource usage.
• Restore performance improvements provide faster disaster recovery operations.
• Error handling enhancements provide better recovery from backup failures.
• Resource management optimizations reduce resource usage for backup operations.

Getting Started

velero install \
    --provider aws \
    --plugins velero/velero-plugin-for-aws:v1.7.0 \
    --bucket my-backup-bucket \
    --secret-file ./credentials-velero

Create a Backup:

apiVersion: velero.io/v1
kind: Backup
metadata:
  name: my-backup
spec:
  includedNamespaces:
  - default
  storageLocation: default
  ttl: 720h0m0s

Summary

Velero 1.12 provides teams with robust backup and disaster recovery capabilities for protecting Kubernetes workloads across cloud providers.