Preparing for backups and disaster recovery

In this section, we will be taking a complete, instant, or scheduled backup of the applications running in our cluster. Not every application requires or can even take advantage of regular backups. Stateless application configuration is usually stored in a Git repository and can be easily deployed as part of the Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines when needed. Of course, this is not the case for stateful applications such as databases, user data, and content. Our business running online services can be challenged to meet legal requirements and industry-specific regulations and retain copies of data for a certain time.

For reasons external or internal to our clusters, we can lose applications or the whole cluster and may need to recover services as quickly as possible. In that case, for disaster recovery use cases, we will learn how to use our backup data stored in an S3 target location to restore services...