Backup and Recovery in Kubernetes

Introduction

While Kubernetes is designed to be highly resilient, it is not immune to catastrophic failures, accidental deletions, or ransomware. Having a robust Backup and Disaster Recovery (DR) strategy is essential for any production cluster.

What needs backing up?

Backing up a Kubernetes cluster involves two distinct components:

1. Cluster State: All the YAML configurations, Deployments, Services, and Secrets stored in the control plane's etcd database.
2. Persistent Data: The actual application data stored in Persistent Volumes (PVs) by databases or stateful applications.

ETCD Snapshots

If you manage the control plane yourself, you can take a snapshot of the etcd database using the etcdctl CLI tool. This backs up the entire state of the cluster. If the master nodes crash, you can restore the etcd snapshot to a fresh cluster to recover all your configurations instantly.

Velero

The industry standard tool for Kubernetes backup and migration is Velero (an open-source project by VMware).

Velero allows you to:

• Take backups of your cluster resources and restore them in case of loss.
• Migrate cluster resources to other clusters (great for upgrading cluster versions).
• Copy production data to development clusters for testing.

Velero works by securely backing up both your Kubernetes object configurations to an S3 bucket, and integrating with cloud providers to take volume snapshots of your Persistent Volumes simultaneously.

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