Scheduled Backups with Kubernetes

It’s a poorly hidden fact that I love Kubernetes. After spending months running everything from Marathon DCOS and CoreOS to Rancher and Docker Swarm in production, Kubernetes is the only container orchestration platform that has truly struck me as truly “production ready” and I have been running it for the past year as a result.

While functionality when I first started using it (v1.4) was somewhat patchy and uninteresting, some of the more recent updates have been making sizeable strides towards addressing the operations challenges we face on a daily basis.

With v1.8, Kubernetes has introduced the CronJob controller to batch/v1beta1, making it generally available for people to play with. Sounds like the perfect time to show you how we use CronJobs to manage automated, scheduled, backups within our environments.