Overview

Design Goals

The design of Kanister was driven by the following main goals:

1. Application-Centric: Given the increasingly complex and distributed nature of cloud-native data services, there is a growing need for data management tasks to be at the application level. Experts who possess domain knowledge of a specific application's needs should be able to capture these needs when performing data operations on that application.

2. API Driven: Data management tasks for each specific application may vary widely, and these tasks should be encapsulated by a well-defined API so as to provide a uniform data management experience. Each application expert can provide an application-specific pluggable implementation that satisfies this API, thus enabling a homogeneous data management experience of diverse and evolving data services.

3. Extensible: Any data management solution capable of managing a diverse set of applications must be flexible enough to capture the needs of custom data services running in a variety of environments. Such flexibility can only be provided if the solution itself can easily be extended.

Getting Started

Follow the instructions in the Installation section to get Kanister up and running on your Kubernetes cluster. Then see Kanister in action by going through the walkthrough under Tutorial.

The Architecture section provides architectural insights into how things work. We recommend that you take a look at it.