Why IssProtect for DevOps is the Superior Choice Over Velero
In the world of Kubernetes, the question of backup often starts with a simple query: “Why should we backup our Kubernetes environment”, “if our manager demands us, can we use Velero? It is free and open source”
It is a fair question. The appeal of "free" is obvious, it helps you with a tick-in-box and you can make sure your management stops buggering you. However, as we have seen with many of our clients at IssTech, open source doesn't always translate to cost savings or either security—especially when disaster strikes. While many organizations begin their journey with Velero, most migrate to a professional solution once they realize the hidden operational and security debts.
At IssTech, we built IssProtect for DevOps (powered by Veeam Kasten, best-in-class technology) to solve exactly these challenges. Here is why relying on Velero can be a risk to your business, and how IssProtect for DevOps delivers a superior, secure, and compliant future.
1. Backup-as-Code: True Mobility for Your Data
The most significant limitation of basic tools like Velero is that they treat backup as a static "snapshot" in time. In a modern DevOps environment, you don't just need to save data; you need to move and adapt it.
IssProtect for DevOps introduces "Backup-as-Code".
This isn't just about backing up; it is about intelligent restoration. With our Backup-as-Code methodology, you can:
Backup any Kubernetes application, stateful, stateless, Git repository, or external/interal databases.
Restore it to an entirely different environment (e.g., moving from AWS to Azure, or OpenShift to native Kubernetes).
Modify the restore on the fly, like switching storage, cloud, ingress or any other configuration.
Using our transformation engine, the restore process automatically adjusts configurations to match the new cloud or Kubernetes environment. Storage classes, load balancer endpoints, and resource limits are transformed via code during the restore. Velero’s static restores often break when moving across clouds, requiring hours of manual fixing. With IssProtect, your data is as agile as your code.
2. Compliance Built for NIS2 and DORA
Security and compliance are not optional add-ons; they are the foundation of IssProtect.
Envelope Encryption: Unlike Velero, which often reuses a single encryption key across backups (a major security weakness), IssProtect uses a master key to derive unique Data Encryption Keys (DEKs) for every single backup.
Immutability: We guarantee functional immutability. Even if a rogue administrator gains access to your cluster, they cannot delete your backups.
Auditability: Every action is logged and can be sent to your SIEM in real-time.
For European businesses, this is critical. IssProtect for DevOps is designed to help you meet strict regulatory requirements like NIS2 and DORA, ensuring your recovery plans are not just theoretical, but legally sound and operationally resilient.
3. Crash Consistency, Durability and Application Awareness: You Need Them All
In the backup world, you typically have to choose between two things:
Crash Consistency: Capturing the filesystem at the exact same moment (usually via local snapshots though Storage vendors or open source tools).
Durability: Exporting that data to a secondary location so it survives a cluster failure
Application Awareness: When backing up your application in a agile world, a new data format may just appear, and with crash consistency backup it maybe destroy your data instead of protecting it. (Companies rely on people just see this and write their own scripts and maintain them).
The Velero Limitation: In the past Velero forces you to choose between Crash Consistency or Durability, but they have now implemented a CSI function together with the Veeam Open Source project Kopia, but it is still not application aware, therefore you never know if your backup is working after you have done a restore-test of every single backup.
The IssProtect for DevOps Advantage: We deliver all three. IssProtect for DevOps captures crash-consistent snapshots and automatically exports them to durable, immutable object storage (like S3), and it’s can read your code to actually protect your data in a correct way, their for always been recoverable even if you only test your backup once a month or once a year. You never have to compromise data integrity and data safety.
4. Performance: The Architecture Matters
The difference in speed and scalability between Velero and IssProtect comes down to architecture.
Velero (DaemonSet Constraints): Velero relies on a DaemonSet agent on every node. It processes volumes one by one (parallel but per node). If a node has multiple heavy volumes, and another node has few smaller volumes, the backup queues up on the large node and will not be load balanced to the smaller volume node, leading to long backup windows and performance lags. It cannot scale up to use free cluster resources.
IssProtect for DevOps (Ephemeral Pods): We utilize an Ephemeral Pod architecture. When a backup runs, IssProtect spins up dedicated, temporary pods to handle deduplication, encryption, and compression. These pods scale horizontally, using available cluster capacity to back up multiple applications in parallel. Once the job is done, the pods vanish.
This means IssProtect for DevOps finishes backups faster, impacts your applications less, and scales effortlessly as your cluster grows.
5. Application Awareness
In a developer world, the words “time is money”, “use the latest technology”, “When can we release the next version” and “can we include that data in our application” could be the most important parts to be a successful application or not.
Velero (Traditional Data Protection): Velero has been developed to work like traditional VMware backup software. It’s made to protect a stateless container in the same way as your traditional backup software protects your VMs in VMware. It relies on 3rd party tools to protect your data or home made scripts that are dependent on your infra peoples knowledge.
IssProtect for DevOps (Modern Data Protection): Release the creativity and protect the data on our developers rules and understands what they have created and and following the code to protect all your data. We don’t gamble with your company's future applications.
6. Partnership, Not Just Software
Perhaps the biggest difference is who stands behind the tool.
When you use free open-source tools, support is a community forum. If you encounter a bug during a critical recovery, you are on your own.
With IssProtect for DevOps, you get IssTech’s and Veeam decades of expertise included. We don't just sell you a license; we become your partner in resilience.
Proactive Guidance: Our solution architects and IssAssist helps you configure your policies to match your specific SLAs.
Managed Confidence: We ensure your environment is protected from Git source code, live containers and external data sources.
Migration Support: innovative use-cases like "Environment Restoration for Migration" allow you to use our tool to safely move workloads between clouds for cost or performance optimization.
Conclusion
"Free" tools like Velero often come with high hidden costs: security gaps, manual operational overhead, and the risk of failed recoveries.
IssProtect for DevOps offers a premium, secure, and automated alternative. By leveraging Backup-as-Code, we turn your backups into strategic assets that enable mobility and resilience, rather than just static files collecting dust.
Don't wait for a disaster to realize the value of professional data defense.
