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Kubernetes is described as a cloud-native technology. However, the cloud-native concept includes the use of on-premises infrastructure.
The virtual environments are mostly VMware based. With this method of deployment, the persistent volumes are carved with VMware vSphere managed storage—VMware vSAN or VMware Virtual Volumes (vVols)—as a first-class disk. A first-class disk (FCD) refers to an improved virtual disk (IVD) which is a feature of VMware vSphere. The FCD is the independent disk which is not associated with VM. When Persistent Volumes for cloud native application is created, a virtual disk (VMDK) is attached to Kubernetes node. The disk backup of FCD is similar to that of other VMDKs.
The container orchestrates volume snapshot backup with which the volume snapshot is taken, mounted, and streamed block data to target storage. For application-level backups, pre- and post-hooks are used which quiesce the database, flush, and take snapshots of Persistent Volumes.
Bare-metal servers, such as Linux servers, run containers and Kubernetes nodes on physical servers. In this method of deployment, the Persistent Volumes are carved out from underlying storage that is SAN or NAS and connected through the storage vendor provided custom drivers or through standardized CSI drivers. The container orchestrates volume snapshot backup with which the volume snapshot is taken, mounted, and streamed block data to target storage. For application-level backups, the database dump backup is taken online and streamed data to target storage.
Container storage interface (CSI) uses an open standard API that enables Kubernetes to expose arbitrary storage systems to containerized workloads. In this method of deployment, external CSI drivers are used to access infrastructure and external storage such as OpenStack.