Feature Update December 2021

The CloudCasa elves has been busy in their workshop for the past few months, and today we’ve delivered a stocking full of brand-new data protection goodies just in time for the holidays!

New service plan introduced

Our low capacity-based pricing has been well received as fair, transparent, and simple, but one bit of feedback we received from smaller customers was that the $699/$899 monthly price with 5TB of included storage for the Starter plan could be too big of an initial step up from the free service plan for those just getting started.

We heard you, and now we’ve done something about it! This month we’ve introduced a new CloudCasa Starter plan with 1TB of included storage at the aggressive price of $199 per month (with a yearly commitment), or $249 per month when paid monthly.

The existing plans have stayed the same, although the names have changed. The 5 TB plan that was formerly Starter is now named “CloudCasa Pro”, and continues to be priced at $699/month. The 20TB plan is now named “CloudCasa Pro+” and continues to be priced at $1499/month. And of course, our CloudCasa Enterprise plan continues to offer custom services and pricing for large customers.

Existing customers will, of course, keep their same plan, at the same price, with the same amount of included storage. The only change they will see is a different plan name on their bill. If existing customers would like to change their plan, they can do so either in the CloudCasa UI (under Preferences/Service Plans) or by contacting Catalogic sales.

For free service users for whom 5TB was too big of a first step, we encourage you to try our new 1TB starter plan. At only $199 per month, we don’t think you’ll find a better deal!

Bring your own storage

Another request we’ve received frequently from users is for CloudCasa to provide an option to support their own object storage buckets. With this release, you can now define your own S3 compliant Object Storage buckets as backup destination.

To configure your own storage buckets, click “Add storage” under Configuration/My Storage. Once a storage destination has been defined, you can select it anywhere as an alternative to CloudCasa storage provider and region.

The following object storage services have been tested and are supported: Amazon S3, Digital Ocean Spaces, Backblaze B2, Wasabi, and Google Cloud Storage. Support for Azure Blob Storage and others is coming soon. Send us a message in Support Chat if another storage provider is of interest to you.

Limitations: User-provided object storage must have an S3-compatible API, and the endpoint must be reachable from the public Internet. We do not currently support the SafeLock protection feature on backups written to user-provided storage.

Storage class remapping during restore

Sometimes when you do a restore of Kubernetes PVs, especially if you are restoring from one cluster to another, the destination cluster won’t have the same storage classes available as the original source cluster. We’ve now solved this problem by giving you the option to remap storage classes at restore time. Just check the “Change Storage Classes” option in the Restore backup page. The UI will display the storage classes used by PVs/PVCs in the backup, and allow you to enter new storage classes to substitute for each during the restore. By default, the same storage classes will be used.

Note that this feature is only available for restores of copy backups, not snapshots.

Application hook templates

When we added user-defined application hooks in the last major feature update, we promised that we would soon make your life easier by adding system-defined application hook templates for common applications. We’ve begun to deliver on that promise with application hook templates for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB. These are now available under Configuration/AppHooks/Templates. They can be used directly in your backup definitions, or copied and modified by clicking the “Clone” icon.

Stay tuned for more application hook templates coming in the near future!

Enhanced logic for label selectors in backup definitions

Before, if you entered multiple label selectors in the “Select Labels” field in a backup definition, the relationship between them was always assumed to be logical AND. So if you entered “a:b c:d”, it meant that a must equal b AND c must equal d in order for the selector to match. Entering “a:b a:c” thus makes no sense and is not allowed.

Now CloudCasa will also allow you to enter a single key with multiple comma-separated values, and the relationship between these is assumed to be logical OR. So entering “a:b,c” means that a must equal b OR c. Entering “a:b,c x:y” means that a must equal b OR c AND x must equal y. That’s (a == b || a == c) && x == y for you C lovers out there. Note that OR is still not possible between different keys.

Note: This change was actually rolled out earlier, but is now fully supported with our new agent release.

UI Changes

For those of you who prefer the dark, we’ve added Dark Mode support to the CloudCasa UI. The option to toggle it on and off is at the very bottom of the user “hamburger” menu accessible at the upper right corner of the page. The darkest nights produce the brightest stars!

We’ve also moved User Settings to the hamburger menu.

Kubernetes agent update

In this release we’ve again made several changes to our Kubernetes agent to add features, improve performance, and fix bugs. You should update any existing CloudCasa agents.

Agent and Helm chart updates for partner marketplaces such as Rancher and Digital Ocean, and Operator updates for OpenShift, should be within the next few days if they are not already. See the FAQ for update instructions.

CloudFormation stack update

Our AWS CloudFormation stack was also updated in order to add the permissions necessary to allow for EKS cluster creation. You can re-launch the stack under the Protection/Accounts tab to apply the update to existing accounts.

Notes

With some browsers you may need to restart, hit Control-F5, and/or clear the cache to make sure you have the latest version of the CloudCasa web app when first logging in after the update.

As always, we want to hear your feedback on new features! You can contact us via the user forum, using the support chat feature, or by sending email to support@cloudcasa.io.

Happy Holidays, and a Happy New Year from Catalogic Software and the CloudCasa team!