Veeam Kasten for Kubernetes

Kubernetes-native backup, disaster recovery and application mobility

As of 1 September 2026, Veeam Kasten for Kubernetes is free to use. Backs up Kubernetes applications as whole units, manifests and volumes together, rather than backing up disks and hoping. Softwr lists it under Backup. Veeam Kasten for Kubernetes is made by Veeam Software, available on Kubernetes, Linux.

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Overview

What Veeam Kasten for Kubernetes does

Veeam Kasten, previously sold as Kasten K10, protects Kubernetes applications. It discovers applications by namespace and label, captures the Kubernetes resource definitions, custom resources and persistent volume data together, and restores them as a coherent unit into the same or a different cluster. It supports policy-driven scheduling, immutable backup targets, application-consistent hooks for databases, and transformation on restore so an application can be moved between clusters, clouds or storage classes. The distinguishing point is that it treats the application, not the volume, as the unit of protection. Snapshotting persistent volumes is straightforward and almost useless on its own, because restoring a Kubernetes application also requires the deployments, config maps, secrets, custom resource definitions and their instances. Kasten captures those, which is why it restores where volume-level backup tools do not. Buyers are platform teams running production workloads on OpenShift, EKS, AKS, GKE or on-premises Kubernetes, particularly where an auditor requires evidence of tested recovery. The trade-off is licensing shape: it is priced per worker node, so a cluster with many small nodes costs more than the same capacity in fewer large ones, and that changes cluster sizing decisions in a way that has nothing to do with engineering.

What people use it for

A platform team that must prove to auditors it can restore a production namespace, not just its disks
Migrating a stateful application from on-premises OpenShift to a managed cloud Kubernetes service
Protecting Kubernetes workloads to an immutable object store so ransomware cannot delete the backups
A team using operators and custom resources that volume-snapshot tools silently fail to capture

Where it falls short

Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Veeam Kasten for Kubernetes.

Licensing is per worker node, so clusters designed with many small nodes for scheduling flexibility pay considerably more than the same capacity in fewer large nodes.
The free Starter edition is scale limited and community supported, so it works for evaluation and small clusters but there is no gentle upgrade path when production grows past the limit.
Backup performance depends on the underlying CSI driver snapshot capability, so on storage without proper CSI snapshot support it falls back to slower generic copying.
Restores into a different cluster need matching custom resource definitions and operator versions present beforehand, so cross-cluster mobility is less automatic than the marketing suggests.
Kasten protects Kubernetes only, so organisations with mixed virtual machine and container estates run it alongside a separate backup product and manage two retention policies and two sets of evidence.

Cross-shopped

What people choose instead of Veeam Kasten for Kubernetes

Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.

Veeam Kasten for Kubernetesvs
CloudCasa
CloudCasa: Cheaper per node with a published rate and a free tier for up to five nodes
Veeam Kasten for Kubernetesvs
Portworx
Portworx: If you need a Kubernetes storage layer with synchronous DR rather than only backup
Veeam Kasten for Kubernetesvs
Veeam Backup & Replication
Veeam Backup & Replication: If the estate is mostly virtual machines and Kubernetes is a small part of it

Pricing

What Veeam Kasten for Kubernetes costs

Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.

Starter

Free

Functionally the same as Enterprise
Limited on scale and support
Intended for evaluation and small non-production clusters
Community support only

Enterprise

On request

Licensed per worker node, quoted annually
Available through AWS, Azure and Google Cloud marketplaces
Vendor support with SLAs
Unlimited cluster scale

Capabilities

Features

Application-aware capture
Backs up Kubernetes resources, custom resources and volume data as one unit
Policy engine
Label-driven backup policies that pick up new applications automatically
Immutable targets
Object lock support on S3-compatible targets so backups survive credential compromise
Restore transformation
Change storage classes, namespaces or resource settings during restore for cross-cluster mobility
Database hooks
Pre and post hooks for application-consistent backups of PostgreSQL, MySQL and MongoDB
Ransomware detection
Anomaly signals on backup content to flag suspicious change patterns

Answered, with sources

Questions people ask

Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.

Is Kasten K10 still a product?

It is now sold as Veeam Kasten for Kubernetes. The kasten.io domain redirects to Veeam and the documentation still lives at docs.kasten.io.

Is there a free edition?

Yes, the Starter edition is free and functionally complete but limited on scale and support, aimed at evaluation and small non-production clusters.

How is Enterprise licensed?

Per worker node. Count your nodes, not your capacity, before comparing quotes, because node sizing directly changes the price.

Keep looking

Where to go from Veeam Kasten for Kubernetes

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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Veeam Kasten for Kubernetes, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.

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