For stateful, cloud-native applications, data operations must often be performed by tools with semantic understanding of the data. The volume-level primitives provided by orchestrators are not sufficient to support data workflows like backup/recovery of complex, distributed databases.

To bridge this gap between operational requirements for these applications and Kubernetes, the open source project Kanister was created. Kanister is a framework to support application-level data management in Kubernetes. It lets developers define relationships between tools and applications, and then makes running those tools in Kubernetes simple. Kanister is managed through Kubernetes API objects called

CustomResourceDefinitions, and all interactions with Kanister take place through Kubernetes tools and APIs. In short, Kanister allows administrators and automation to perform data operations at the Kubernetes level regardless of the complexity of the application.