Building a Resilient Backup and Recovery Strategy for Red Hat OpenShift

As recent global outages and cyber incidents have shown, even well-managed platforms can become unavailable unexpectedly. For organisations running business-critical workloads on Red Hat OpenShift, the challenge is not simply preventing failure, but ensuring services can be recovered quickly when it occurs.

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) is an enterprise Kubernetes platform that enables organisations to build, deploy, manage and scale containerised applications across on-premises, cloud and hybrid environments. As OpenShift becomes the foundation for more business-critical workloads, ensuring those environments can be recovered quickly following failure, cyberattack or human error is just as important as keeping them operational day to day.

A successful OpenShift backup strategy must protect both the platform itself and the applications running on it. These are two distinct layers, each serving a different purpose during recovery. OpenShift separates control plane and application backups because they protect different parts of the environment. Both are essential for effective disaster recovery.

Protecting the Control Plane with etcd Backups

OpenShift stores its cluster state in etcd, the distributed database that underpins Kubernetes. It contains critical information about cluster resources, configuration and operational status.

Regular etcd snapshots are recommended by Red Hat. These backups allow administrators to restore the OpenShift control plane to a known good state in the event of corruption, accidental deletion or a significant infrastructure failure.

A typical backup process on a control plane node includes:

1. Connecting to the control plane node.
2. Accessing the host operating system.
3. Running the built-in cluster-backup.sh utility.

This process creates 1) an etcd snapshot database file 2) static pod resources archive required during recovery

These backup files should always be stored external to the cluster in secure storage.

When an etcd Restore May Be Required

• Control plane recovery is typically performed when:
• Critical cluster objects have been deleted
• etcd data has become corrupted
• Multiple control plane nodes have been lost
• The cluster must be restored to a known operational state

Recovery Prerequisites

Before attempting recovery, organisations should ensure they have:

• A valid etcd snapshot
• The static pod resource backup files created by the backup process
• Access to at least one control plane node

At a high level, recovery involves stopping control plane services, restoring the snapshot and associated resources, restarting services and verifying that cluster operators return to a healthy state.

Regular recovery testing is critical. A backup is only valuable if it can be restored successfully when required.

Protecting Applications and Business Data

Restoring the OpenShift control plane alone does not restore business services. Application backups protect the workloads running within the cluster, including:

• Namespaces
• Kubernetes resources
• Persistent volumes
• Internal container images
• OpenShift-specific resources such as Routes and ImageStreams
• Application data and configuration stored outside Kubernetes

This layer of protection is particularly important for stateful applications and databases where business-critical data resides.

Many organisations use enterprise backup platforms for workload protection because they provide access to a wider range of storage targets and security capabilities. These can include:

• Immutable storage repositories
• Public cloud backup targets
• Long-term archive storage
• Robotic tape libraries
• Malware scanning and cyber recovery capabilities

Application Backup Process (High Level)

A typical implementation includes:

1. Installing the backup operator
2. Configuring the Kubernetes data mover
3. Deploying required certificates
4. Adding the OpenShift cluster to the backup platform
5. Creating backup policies and schedules

Application Recovery Process (High Level)

Recovery typically involves:

1. Selecting the required recovery point
2. Choosing the application or namespace to restore
3. Selecting the destination environment
4. Restoring from snapshots or backup copies

The appropriate recovery point should align with the organisation's Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and business requirements.

OpenShift Virtualisation Considerations

The same principles apply to OpenShift Virtualisation environments.

Where OpenShift is being used to host virtual machines, organisations should ensure the Container-Native Virtualization (CNV) operator is installed on all relevant clusters and that virtual machine workloads are included within backup policies and recovery testing programmes.

Enterprise Backup Solutions for OpenShift

Several Red Hat-certified backup solutions support OpenShift environments, including:

• Cohesity NetBackup
• Cohesity DataProtect
• Red Hat OADP (Velero)
• Veeam Kasten K10
• Commvault
• Dell PowerProtect Data Manager
• Portworx
• Rubrik

The choice of platform will often depend on existing backup strategy, infrastructure standards, cyber resilience requirements and operational preferences.

Backup and Recovery Best Practices

A strong OpenShift backup strategy should include:

• Regular testing of restore procedures
• Storage of backup data outside the cluster
• Adoption of the 3-2-1 backup rule [Three copies of data; Two different storage types; ] One off-site copy
• Encryption of backup repositories
• Use of immutable storage where available
• Automated etcd backup processes
• Documented recovery procedures that are reviewed and tested regularly

Recovery planning should also cover dependencies beyond OpenShift itself. If application delivery relies on CI/CD pipelines, source code repositories, container registries or external infrastructure services, these components should also be backed up and incorporated into broader disaster recovery planning.

Final Thoughts

Backup and recovery are fundamental to operating OpenShift at scale. Protecting applications alone is not enough, the platform itself must also be recoverable. Equally, restoring the control plane without recovering application data will not bring business services back online.

Organisations that treat backup and recovery as an ongoing operational discipline, rather than a compliance exercise, are better positioned to meet recovery objectives, reduce operational risk and recover quickly from outages, cyber incidents or disaster scenarios. The ultimate measure of success is not whether backups exist, but whether critical services can be restored when they are needed most.

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