AKS Backup & Restore

Disaster recovery patterns for AKS using Velero (formerly Heptio Ark).

Note: These walkthroughs reference “Ark” which has been renamed to Velero. The concepts and architecture remain the same.

Contents

File	Description
velero-restic.md	Backup and failover between AKS clusters in different regions using Velero + Restic (file-level backup)
velero-snapshot.md	Backup and failover using Velero + Azure Disk Snapshots (block-level backup)

When to Use This

• You need disaster recovery across Azure regions for AKS workloads
• You need to migrate workloads between AKS clusters
• You want to back up both Kubernetes resources and persistent volumes

Choosing Between Restic and Snapshots

Approach	Pros	Cons
Restic	Works across cloud providers, file-level granularity	Slower for large volumes
Azure Disk Snapshots	Fast, native Azure integration	Azure-only, disk-level only

Prerequisites

• Two AKS clusters (source + destination) for DR testing
• Azure Blob Storage account for backup storage
• Velero CLI installed