Downtime is costly – cross-cloud resilience is survival. Disaster Recovery (DR) in multi-cloud Kubernetes ensures workloads stay online even if an entire region or provider fails. Here’s how SREs design it right.
1. Architecture Strategy
- Active-Active: both clusters handle traffic; use global load balancer (e.g., Cloudflare, Route 53).
- Active-Passive: secondary cluster on standby; synced via backup & restore.
- Multi-Region: within one provider, zones replicate control-plane & etcd state.
2. Data Replication & State Management
- Use Velero, Stash, or Kasten K10 for snapshot & restore of etcd and PVCs.
- For DBs (Postgres, MongoDB): set cross-region replication or read replicas.
- Sync critical configs via GitOps (ArgoCD/Flux) → ensures identical manifests.
Example backup schedule (Velero): velero backup create daily-backup –include-namespaces prod –ttl 24h
3. Cluster Federation & Failover
- KubeFed or Submariner for federated service discovery.
- Global ingress with NGINX Ingress + ExternalDNS for multi-cluster routing.
- Use KubeHA or custom controllers to detect unresponsive clusters → auto-switch traffic.
4. Cross-Cloud Networking
- Connect clusters via VPN / interconnect with low latency (WireGuard, Cloud Interconnect).
- Use Service Mesh (Istio, Linkerd) for cross-cluster service failover and mutual TLS.
- Keep DNS TTL low (≤ 30 s) for faster rerouting during failover.
5. Testing Your DR Plan
- Simulate outages: kill primary control-plane or cut network path.
- Validate: failover latency, DNS propagation, data consistency.
- Automate game days:
- chaosctl inject failure –type=node-shutdown –target=primary-cluster
6. Observability & Alerts
- Prometheus federation → unified metrics from all clouds.
- Loki + Tempo → cross-cloud logs/traces.
- KubeHA → correlates failover events, root cause, and recovery time.
Bottom Line: Multi-cloud DR isn’t about redundancy – it’s about predictable recovery under chaos. Design for failure, replicate state, test continuously, and let automation handle the switch.
Follow KubeHA for DR blueprints, YAML samples, and cross-cluster recovery automation.
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KubeHA’s introduction, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyzTQPLGaD0