IBM & Red Hat on AWS

Implementing Disaster Recovery for Red Hat OpenShift workloads using CloudCasa and Red Hat OpenShift on AWS (ROSA)

In today’s cloud-native world, organizations need an easy way to move and manage their containerized workloads between the cloud and on-premises data centers. Red Hat OpenShift enables enterprises to deploy and manage containerized workloads and virtual machines efficiently across hybrid environments, allowing teams to focus on application development rather than infrastructure management.

For Red Hat OpenShift customers, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and CloudCasa address these needs by delivering a complete solution for protecting and moving OpenShift workloads between on-premises environments and AWS. This integration enables streamlined backup and recovery operations, helping customers maintain business continuity while maximizing their hybrid cloud investments without adding complexity to their operations.

In this blog post you will learn, how ROSA simplifies containerized workload management, the benefits of integrating CloudCasa with ROSA, and better practices for protecting and moving OpenShift workloads between on-premises and AWS environments.

Understanding the Challenge: Modern Hybrid Infrastructure

Many organizations run their applications in two ways: as containers and as traditional virtual machines. They rely on the Red Hat OpenShift Platform and OpenShift Virtualization and to manage these workloads, both in their own data centers and on AWS. The resulting mixed environment, particularly for legacy applications and stateful workloads, creates technical limitations for data recovery and business continuity.

Organizations require comprehensive protection that addresses four critical requirements:

  • Native OpenShift Integration: Understand the OpenShift and OpenShift Virtualization architecture and APIs to provide native interactions
  • Unified Protection: Enable enhanced security features for both containerized workloads and virtual machines from a single interface
  • Offsite Backup: Support for secure, scalable offsite backup to cloud object storage services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) & Amazon S3 Glacier for deep storage
  • Flexible Recovery Options: The capability to restore workloads quickly to either on-premises environments and/or cloud platforms while meeting RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective) goals

Customers frequently find their existing backup solutions limiting and lacking customization, resulting in the creation of custom scripts and manual processes, which increase complexity and risk. Modern enterprises need purpose-built solutions that give them flexibility to handle the intricacies of today’s hybrid environments while maintaining simplicity and reliability.

CloudCasa: Native Backup Solution

CloudCasa by Catalogic delivers a comprehensive, Kubernetes-native backup solution specifically designed for Red Hat OpenShift workloads. This purpose-built service integrates with OpenShift, including full support for OpenShift Virtualization.

Key Capabilities

  • Complete OpenShift Protection: Protect your OpenShift clusters, including Kubernetes resources, persistent volumes, and virtual machines.
  • Flexible Storage Options: Store your backups securely with strong encryption both in transit and at rest using either CloudCasa’s managed storage service or your preferred object storage solution, giving you complete control over your data.
  • Streamlined Management: Manage your backup operations through an intuitive Software as a Service (SaaS) interface that simplifies policy creation and backup scheduling, reducing operational overhead.
  • Granular Recovery Control: Restore entire clusters, specific namespaces, or complete virtual machines to a previous point in time, satisfying RTO and RPO requirements, and providing quick recovery from ransomware attacks.
  • Existing Cloud Backup: CloudCasa also supports existing cloud database and storage services such as Amazon Relation Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), and Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), providing encryption, shared policies, and cross region restore, all from within same console.

These capabilities make CloudCasa an ideal solution for platform teams looking to implement enterprise-grade protection for their OpenShift environments without adding complexity to their operations.

ROSA: Managed OpenShift on AWS

ROSA combines the power of Red Hat OpenShift with the scale and reliability of AWS, offering several key advantages for environment resiliency:

  • Accelerated Cloud Deployment: Launch production-ready OpenShift clusters in AWS quickly, minimizing downtime during recovery scenarios.
  • Native AWS Integration: Leverage deep integration with essential AWS services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for compute resources, Amazon S3 for storage, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) for security, Amazon CloudWatch for monitoring, and more.
  • Consistent Operations: Maintain operational consistency between your on-premises and cloud environments with unified OpenShift interfaces and workflows.
  • Complete VM Support: Take advantage of OpenShift Virtualization on AWS bare metal instances to restore both containerized applications and virtual machines in the same place, ensuring comprehensive workload recovery.
  • Ansible Automation Platform (AAP) Integration: Utilize AAP on AWS for seamless event-driven automation of your entire infrastructure not only for containers and VMs, but also AWS native services. AAP excels at creation, management, and advanced day 2 operations for resources across your workload.

This combination enables true hybrid business continuity, allowing movement of both containers and virtual machines from your on-premises environment to AWS. The result is a robust recovery solution that meets modern enterprise requirements for resiliency with minimal downtime.

CloudCasa + ROSA: Enterprise-Grade Recovery Solution in AWS

Backing up your data is crucial, but a successful data recovery solution requires a customizable process and reliable environment for workload restoration. CloudCasa supports restoring to a different cluster, different namespace, and even performs deduplication on persistent volume data. In cases where an entire cluster dies, CloudCasa can restore to a new, customer created cluster. ROSA serves as an ideal, fully managed recovery destination due to its rapid provisioning time and availability on AWS. Once the cluster is created, apply the agent YAML file from the original cluster and run a restore.

The following architecture diagram (Figure 1) shows the CloudCasa backup and recovery flow

cloudcasa Reference Architecture

Figure 1: CloudCasa backup and recovery flow

Implementation guide: DR in action

Prerequisites:

  • An active CloudCasa account. Full details of how to access CloudCasa can be found in the user guide.
  • An AWS account with administrative access
  • A ROSA Cluster with cluster-admin privileges (Note: There are AWS costs associated with ROSA cluster)

Step by step Implementation:

1. On-Premises Backup configuration: CloudCasa backs up your OpenShift cluster (apps + VMs) to Amazon S3.

Log in to the CloudCasa console and select the resource(s) you want to protect. (application namespaces, persistent volume claims, VMs, etc.).

Backing up OpenShift Virtualization VMs requires no more configuration than backing up any other Kubernetes cluster. Detection of VMs is automatic. It is recommended to back up the entire cluster. However, individual VMs can also be selected for backup using the resource browser in the Select resources tab of the cluster backup wizard. Doing it this way, all resources associated with the VMs are automatically included in the backup.

The following image (Figure 2) shows the CloudCasa resource browser of the cluster backup wizard

CloudCasa console displaying cluster resources

Figure 2: CloudCasa console displaying cluster resources

2. Disaster Scenario Handling: If your on-prem environment experiences broad access, goes offline, or suffers unintended data access, it can be restored in just a few steps from the Cluster Restores tab.

CloudCasa keeps a catalog location of all your Recovery Point snapshots from snapshots taken on local storage to copies made to an alternate storage location.

The following image (Figure 3) shows the CloudCasa recovery point (snapshot) list

CloudCasa recovery point (snapshot) list

Figure 3: CloudCasa recovery point (snapshot) list

    • ROSA Cluster Preparation: Prior to running the restore, verify the destination cluster. For more rapid recovery, a ROSA cluster can be always active and available. If that is not an option, deploy a new ROSA cluster, including OpenShift Virtualization on AWS bare metal if needed, using Ansible Automation Platform or similar automation.
    • Workload Restoration: Once the destination cluster is verified, use the CloudCasa console to restore the Kubernetes workloads and VMs into the ROSA cluster.

CloudCasa can restore anything from a specific Kubernetes custom resource, VM, or persistent volume claim easily through an intuitive Recovery Point Browser. Even restoring an individual file from a PVC is possible.

The following image (Figure 4) shows the CloudCasa view of the Recover Point Browser

CloudCasa view of the Recover Point Browser

Figure 4: CloudCasa view of the Recover Point Browser

3. Business Continuity Maintained: Validate your applications in the destination (recovery) ROSA cluster.

Cleanup

For the final step, it’s important to clean up any resources you’ve deployed to avoid unnecessary costs and keep your environment clean.

  1. Delete the destination ROSA cluster
  2. Remove any unnecessary backups from CloudCasa

Summary

The combination of CloudCasa, ROSA, and AWS delivers compelling advantages for organizations running OpenShift environments. This integrated solution provides unified protection for both containers and virtual machines, reducing the complexity of managing multiple backup tools. With pre-integrated cloud data recovery solution targets and automated restore capabilities, organizations can significantly reduce recovery times during critical situations. Whether you’re using CloudCasa as a service or deploying it directly into your OpenShift cluster, CloudCasa can maintain consistent workflows across on-premises and ROSA environments. For enterprises still depending on legacy backup scripts or disconnected VM protection tools, this modern recovery solution offers a clear path forward. It’s time to embrace a protection strategy that matches the sophistication of your OpenShift infrastructure and meets the demands of today’s hybrid cloud operations.

In this blog post, you learned how to implement a comprehensive disaster recovery solution for Red Hat OpenShift workloads using CloudCasa and ROSA. We explored the challenges of hybrid infrastructure protection, the key capabilities of CloudCasa, and the benefits of using ROSA as a recovery target in AWS. By leveraging this integrated solution, organizations can achieve Unified protection for containers and VMs, Reduced complexity in backup management, significantly faster recovery times, Consistent workflows across on-premises and cloud environments

Visit the Red Hat OpenShift offers on the AWS Marketplace:

Get started with ROSA today: Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA)

Explore CloudCasa for your DR needs: CloudCasa in the AWS Marketplace

Further Content:

Steve Mirman

Steve Mirman

Steve Mirman is an ex-Red Hatter, ex-IBMer, and current Partner Solutions Architect at AWS. He has over 20 years of experience helping customers architect, develop, deploy, and migrate enterprise applications.

Martin Phan

Martin Phan

I’m the Field CTO for the Americas at Catalogic Software, with over 25 years of experience in IT services and software. I’m passionate about technology and sharing insights with others—whether through demos, webinars, blogs, or YouTube content. You can follow me on X (@MartinGPhan) or check out my latest blogs and videos on the @cloudcasa and @catalogicsw channels.

Tristan Poisson

Tristan Poisson

Tristan is a Partner Solutions Architect who’s been with AWS for over 2 years as a member of the Red Hat partnership team. He graduated from St. John’s University with a Bachelors in Computer Science in May 2023.