In Place Cloud-Native Application Recovery with Clumio by Commvault

Akshay Joshi and Jeff Cassiana introduce Clumio as a SaaS-first cyber-resilience solution that provides cloud data protection and in-place recovery for modern data pipelines. Founded in 2017 and acquired by Commvault in 2024, Clumio has expanded its cloud-native support across workloads like Amazon S3, DynamoDB, RDS, Apache Iceberg, and Google Cloud Storage. The presenters address critical cloud challenges, such as dynamic infrastructure, advanced cyber threats, integration demands, and emerging risks from agentic frontier AI models, by highlighting Clumio’s serverless architecture, immutable air-gapped backups via Secure Vault, and granular in-place recovery capabilities.

To demonstrate cloud application resilience, the presentation outlines three core requirements: protecting the entire data pipeline, delivering near real-time recovery, and scaling to meet large cloud demands. These principles are applied to “Clumio Final Cut,” a simulated movie application powered by DynamoDB, Amazon S3, and Apache Iceberg, featuring user watch lists and a generative AI chatbot. The first failure scenario examines a bad canary code deployment that corrupts DynamoDB tenant partitions at different point-in-time timestamps, forcing Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) to manage partition recovery, application reconfiguration, operational costs, and downtime.

The presentation contrasts the traditional “recovery hell”, which requires doing full table restores for every impacted partition, cherry-picking data into the source table, and cleaning up temporary tables, with the Clumio Backtrack approach. Clumio Backtrack for DynamoDB offers a simplified two-step, point-in-time, in-place recovery process directly to the source table without requiring temporary resources or application reconfigurations. The session concludes with a demonstration where a simulated corruption wipes customer watch list data from a DynamoDB table, followed by a fast, in-place restoration of the records through Clumio’s Secure Vault portal.