On Kubernetes Disaster Recovery

Every mission critical application should have a foolproof disaster recovery strategy. To ensure the high availability of any application, it is essential to ensure that backups are maintained and that restoration is performed as quickly as possible.

A disaster can be a human error, a cyber attack, a natural disaster, or an outage.

Spend enough time studing your backup requirements

Backing up Kubernetes bases applications is a whole other game. With so many components (clusters, pods, containers, etc.), creating backups can be hell.

The Organization should invest time in researching the best possible backup approach. Backups can be created manually or they can be automated. For manual backups, developers can easily procure extensive documentation on how to create backups and or how to write backup scripts. To automate the whole process, organizations can invest in solutions that can help ease the burden.

The idea, when creating backups of K8s-based workloads, is to not only store application data but to also store persistent volumes that hold critical business data. Organizations should also be clear on where they want to store these backups to avoid confusion in the later stages.

Have a restore plan

A restore plan should be chalked out before organizations move ahead with creating backups. The point of the backups is to restore them when the need arises. Organizations should be clear about where the backups are to be stored and where they will be restored. For manual restore, updates in component configurations should be documented clearly. This will avoid any hiccups when bringing your system back online in case of a disaster. Of course, organizations can choose from a number of solutions that take care of all these configurations for you and help avoid human intervention, thereby leaving no room for human error.

Security

The organization needs to protect it’s backups from any attackers. It can make the mistake of slacking on the backup security. However, your application is as secure as your backup. To avoid unwarranted access to backups, organizations should employ identity access management (IAM) or role-based access control (RBAC). Only the members who are assigned to monitor or verify backups should be given access rights. Another important measure that can be taken to curb any attacks is data encryption. Organizations can invest in a disaster recovery solution that takes care of backup security for them.

Application-aware backups

Kubernetes’ portability is a double-edged sword. While it makes it easy to build new applications using existing services and helps ease migration to different environments, it makes backing up workloads a bumpy ride. As many workloads running on the k8s platform are stateless, it’s important to have application-aware backups that provide context to the backup and different components involved in it. This can be done with the help of a Kubernetes backup solution. Organizations can automate the entire backup and recovery process to avoid any failures. These solutions also provide options to deploy the backups in various locations and help to make restoring to a brand-new environment a breeze.