Introducing APEX Navigator for Kubernetes: Application Mobility

This is part 3 of the three-part blog series introducing Dell APEX Navigator for Kubernetes.

Application Mobility Overview

Data and application mobility is an essential element in maintaining the required availability and service level for a given application. From a workload standpoint, the application needs to have a redundant instance at a target site that can be used as a failover instance. For this to work for stateful applications, we need to ensure data availability on the target site. Data mobility can be achieved in two ways:

• Continuous replication at the storage level using the Replication Container Storage Module
• Point-in-time host-based backup using the Application Mobility Container Storage Module

The Replication container storage module for Dell storage platforms orchestrates the data replication using the storage platform’s native replication capabilities. The Application Mobility module on the other hand uses the host-based backup approach. While both the approaches work for Dell storage platforms through the command line interface, the first release of APEX Navigator for Kubernetes user interface supports only the host-based backup functionality called the Application Mobility Module.

The following are the pre-requisites for application mobility:

• Source and target K8s clusters onboarded and Application Mobility CSM installed.
• Source and target Dell storage systems onboarded.
• S3 Object Store accessible from source and target for the intermediate backup copy of the application data

Adding Object Store

We already covered how to connect clusters and storage in previous sections. Let us see how to set up the S3 Object Store within the APEX Navigator for Kubernetes.

Navigate to the Storage tab and click on the “Add object store” button. This launches a dialog to add the details of the Object store:

If using Amazon Web services (AWS) S3 for the object store, the region on the Kubernetes backup storage location object needs to be updated prior to creating a clone. On each Kubernetes cluster where Application Mobility is installed, run this command to update the region:

kubectl patch backupstoragelocation/default -n dell-csm --type='merge' -p '{"spec":{"config":{"region":"<region- name>"}}}'

Application Mobility definition

To start an Application mobility job, go to the Application Mobility tab and click “Create Clone”. This launches a wizard that takes you through the following steps:

• Specify source cluster and the namespace of the application to be moved.
• Specify target cluster and the namespace.
• Specify the Object store details to be used for the intermediate backup copy.
• Review details and click Create clone to start the mobility job.

You can track mobility jobs under Jobs section like below:

Authors: 

Parasar Kodati, Engineering Technologist, Dell ISG

Florian Coulombel, Engineering Technologist, Dell ISG