Building a Real-World Kubernetes Disaster Recovery & Backup Automation System

Source: Dev.to

Overview

I built a Kubernetes disaster recovery and backup automation system to handle real‑world failure scenarios such as accidental namespace deletion or configuration loss. While Kubernetes is self‑healing at the pod level, it does not protect against human mistakes. This project focuses on backing up and restoring the actual cluster state.

How It Works

• API Interaction: The system connects directly to the Kubernetes API using Node.js and fetches live resources.
• YAML Cleaning: Fetched manifests are cleaned by removing runtime‑specific fields (e.g., uid, resourceVersion, timestamps, status). This makes the backups portable and safe to re‑apply on the same or a different cluster.
• Timestamped Backups: Each backup is stored in a timestamped directory, enabling restoration to a specific point in time.

Testing the Recovery Process

1. Deploy a production‑like application and verify it is running.
2. Intentionally delete the resources to simulate a disaster.
3. The restore logic reads the cleaned YAML files and recreates the resources.
4. Validate recovery by observing deployments and pods return to a running state.

Production‑Ready Deployment

• Containerization: The backup logic is containerized and runs inside the cluster as a Kubernetes CronJob.
• RBAC: Implemented a dedicated ServiceAccount with least‑privilege permissions, allowing the automation to read cluster resources without excessive rights.

Learnings

• Gained deeper understanding of Kubernetes internals and metadata handling.
• Explored RBAC design for secure automation.
• Learned how real disaster recovery systems are architected beyond basic self‑healing.

Source Code

GitHub Repository – k8s-disaster-recovery-automation