Kubernetes Disaster Recovery Considerations

The saying “failing to plan is planning to fail” is sometimes used as a warning to consider what-if scenarios and make necessary adjustments. Weddings, road trips or a large group Zoom meeting are the types of events during which organizers may want to review general security and contingency plans against the unexpected. Inclement weather, road work or unauthorized participants could be problematic, to say the least.

In the world of data operations, administrators contend with the possibility of data loss via malware, network outage or another disaster. Within strictly on-premises data centers, one of these events could indeed be calamitous. Many modern data centers operate in the cloud — often across multiple clouds. Non-IT professionals could be fooled into thinking that a multi-cloud presence is enough to mitigate risk of data loss. In other words, if one cloud (provider) has an outage, the organization may have a snapshotted version of a critical application and its associated data in another zone, or at another site. 

What does it take to be prepared?

In real life, however, disaster recovery has to account for applications and their associated data. 

The challenges are significant, as an organization may face the outage of an entire site, not just a node. 

Those responsible for data management, such as facilities managers or data admins, have a number of factors to consider, such as: 

• What’s the budget for data management and backup?
• How do you balance costs and possible risks? 
• What are the business requirements for recovery time? Hours? Minutes? Zero? (see also: Recovery Time Objectives or RTOs)
• How many copies do we create? 
• How often do we perform a backup?
• How secure are the backups? 
• Is customer data protected?
• Is a full-site backup needed? 
• Can backups be automated? 
• Does the organization require the ability to perform storage transforms such as restoring to a different cloud, availability zone or environment?

These considerations, while not comprehensive, also point to the need for a solid data management and data protection strategy. In a Kubernetes environment, cloud-native app support, flexibility (such as choice of K8s distribution), security and encryption, and data (and application) consistency are only a few requirements. As Kubernetes adoption continues to grow, so does the set of tools to help manage and protect Kubernetes data and workloads.

Kasten K10 by Veeam enables granular restores, and it allows users to restore required application components to a specific, predetermined location. An application can be cloned into the same or even into a new namespace. Users can also decide to restore only an application subset, such as the data volume. This flexible approach makes restoring simple and powerful by enabling users to select the appropriate point-in-time copy of an application.

In addition, Kasten K10 users can enable near-zero RTO for their Kubernetes workloads by automating complete application stack replication to a standby cluster. Kasten K10 was designed for Kubernetes, and allows for fast failover across cloud regions, cloud providers, or between on-premises and public cloud infrastructure. 

Not all businesses are prepared, but they can create practical recovery plans that will mitigate downtime and protect mission-critical data with the proper tools. With foresight and planning, recovering from an unforeseen event need not be a catastrophe.

To learn more about bringing Kubernetes into your disaster recovery plan, download this complimentary report from Forrester Research.