It’s always a good time to reflect on something that should send shivers down the spine of any organization: disaster recovery. As climate-related disruptions (most recently, the devastating Hurricanes Helene and Milton) become more frequent and severe, it’s past time to create up a solid disaster recovery strategy before the next storm (inevitably) brews. Even though Kubernetes is well known for its reliability and scalability, you still need to think about how to create a solid disaster recovery strategy for your infrastructure.
In recent years, climate change has evolved from a distant specter into a hard-to-deny threat, affecting businesses worldwide. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) released its disaster report for 2023, a historic year of expensive disasters and extremes. There were 28 weather and climate disasters in 2023 with a price tag of at least $92.9 billion, each one a ghastly reminder of the chaos that often ensues when these disasters strike. Just like a haunted house filled with unexpected frights, organizations must be prepared for inevitable climate-related disruptions.
Imagine waking up one morning to find all your critical data has vanished into thin air—like a ghost walking through the walls. In Kubernetes environments, where applications and data are spread across multiple containers, nodes, clusters, and geographic regions, widespread climate events could result in an unexpectedly increased risk of data loss. For example, flooding or hurricanes could affect multiple data centers in a region, impacting multiple clusters. Similarly, power outages from extreme events could disrupt multiple nodes.
It can be difficult to ensure that all components (containers, pods, and services) are properly backed up and can be restored quickly and easily. Stateful applications are likely to require greater consideration to ensure data persistence and consistency during recovery. For high-throughput systems, even brief outages due to climate disasters can result in significant data loss. And the dynamic nature of Kubernetes itself means that data states can change rapidly, which makes point-in-time recovery more challenging.
Service disruptions can cast a long shadow over your organization, impacting both your reputation and customer trust. Kubernetes’ distributed nature can (in some cases) amplify the impact of climate-related disruptions: for example, if multiple nodes and clusters are affected by widespread events simultaneously. If you haven’t configured it properly, disruption to one component could cascade to others.
In addition, even major cloud providers experience outages related to extreme weather, sometimes impacting entire cloud regions. If these outages disrupt multiple data centers or cloud providers, they could affect multiple Kubernetes clusters, even with multi-region deployments. Balancing the need for rapid recovery with the risk of overwhelming your recovering systems requires careful management.
Kubernetes environments indisputably offer powerful capabilities but also introduce complexity that can make recovery feel like navigating a maze. The distributed architecture adds layers of complexity to recovery efforts if multiple nodes and clusters are affected simultaneously. Restoring the entire ecosystem, including configurations, persistent volumes, and custom resources, is complex. Similarly, if a single critical service is affected, it could lead to widespread outages across the entire application stack. Restoring services in the right order after a disruption can be challenging due to the complex service interdependencies in Kubernetes environments.
You’ll also need to consider data consistency challenges and how resolving inconsistencies during recovery can result in extended service disruption times. Similarly, multi-cloud and hybrid deployments can complicate recovery efforts if climate disasters affect different regions or providers simultaneously. Coordinating recovery across diverse environments with varying APIs, storage systems, and networking configurations adds still more complexity. Without a well-planned disaster recovery strategy, organizations may find themselves lost.
Your data needs to be protected against climate disasters and other threats. During climate disasters, there's an increased risk of data corruption due to power fluctuations or hardware damage. Malicious actors (such as cyberattackers) may also take advantage of disruptions related to climate disasters to target vulnerable systems.
Immutable backups guarantee that the recovery data remains intact and unaltered, even if primary systems are compromised, which provides an additional layer of protection against ransomware or malicious alterations to backup data. Immutable backups also provide a guaranteed, consistent state to recover from, reducing uncertainty during the recovery process.
This is especially important in Kubernetes environments where application states can and often do change quickly. The immutable backup acts as a solution to threats in multiple forms; it can even enable you to meet compliance standards by providing an unalterable record of data at specific points in time for post-disaster audits and reporting.
Adopting a multi-cloud approach can protect against turbulent times. By distributing workloads geographies, you can put them in multiple data centers in different regions or countries. This reduces the risk of all services being impacted by a localized climate event (such as flooding, hurricanes, or wildfires). With this approach, services can continue running on other providers even if one cloud provider experiences an outage due to a climate disaster. Kubernetes' ability to automatically reschedule pods across available nodes also helps to maintain service continuity.
In a multi-cloud environment, Kubernetes allows for intelligent load balancing, dynamically routing away from affected regions during climate events and thereby ensuring minimal service disruption for end-users. It can also provide flexibility in resource allocation by quickly provisioning additional resources from unaffected cloud providers. This scalability helps you maintain performance and handle potential surges in demand during crises. This means you need to do some work up front, including:
You may also want to consider employing a service mesh for improved traffic management and observability in multi-cloud scenarios. Done right, adopting a multi-cloud strategy will help you ensure continuity when the unexpected occurs.
A disaster recovery plan is only as effective as your ability to execute on it, which is why documenting your plan in detail and testing it regularly is the most important way to ensure its effectiveness. This includes:
A documented and tested plan helps you meet regulatory requirements and can improve coordination because everyone understands their role and is able to work together effectively. This is particularly important during a climate disaster, when resources may be limited—the event may also impact your team members, so you’ll need to be able to prioritize and shift responsibilities based on availability. Document this in your plan and you’ll be able to recover faster and minimize the impact of a climate disaster.
With climate-related disruptions on the rise, having a solid disaster recovery strategy is essential. While Kubernetes itself isn't inherently more vulnerable to climate disasters, its complexity and the critical nature of the applications it often hosts make robust disaster recovery planning essential.
For organizations leveraging Kubernetes environments, it’s time to plan for disaster recovery by implementing immutable backups, adopting multi-cloud strategies, and documenting and regularly testing your disaster recovery plans. Once you do, you’ll be well-equipped to face whatever happens! Let’s not treat disaster recovery as a compliance checkbox and instead recognize it as a business imperative. In an era of uncertainty and downright alarming possibilities, a robust disaster recovery strategy can protect you from the unexpected, no matter what form it comes in.
Not sure how to set up your disaster recovery strategy? Fairwinds can help.
Originally published October 29, 2024.
