Essential Techniques for Backing Up Amazon EKS Clusters

Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) clusters are essential for many Kubernetes deployments, but managing these clusters can become complicated, especially regarding disaster recovery, application mobility, and data protection. As your EKS infrastructure grows to support various tools and skills, properly safeguarding against disasters, enabling seamless application movement, and protecting valuable data becomes increasingly vital.

Understanding AWS EKS Backup

To achieve full data protection and disaster recovery, you should understand five key levels of EKS backup: cluster-level backup, node-level backup, data volume backup, control-plane, and application-level backup. These options provide a spectrum of strategies to safeguard your EKS environment in the face of unexpected issues.

Cluster-Level Backup

A complete cluster-level backup should include the entire Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) cluster, worker nodes, networking, and all applications and data running within the cluster. It delivers the most thorough backup, enabling you to recover the whole cluster following a catastrophic failure or replicate it in a different AWS region.

Control Plane Backup

Control plane backup is a vital part of an EKS backup plan concentrating on capturing and preserving the configuration and state of EKS control plane components like the API server, etcd database, and authentication mechanisms. Control plane backups are necessary for disaster recovery, guaranteeing you can restore the control plane’s configuration and state if issues arise.

Node-Level Backup

Node-level backups are a subset of full-cluster backups, focusing on capturing state and data specific to individual worker nodes within the EKS cluster. These backups let you restore particular nodes or troubleshoot node-specific problems without impacting the whole cluster.

Data Volume Backup

Data volume backups are another subset of full-cluster backups, concentrating on capturing data stored in persistent volumes linked to pods running in the EKS cluster. They protect against data loss for stateful applications and enable restoring application-specific data without full cluster restoration.

Implementing AWS EKS Backup

Let’s review a simple example of configuring backup for EKS. Imagine a Kubernetes administrator tasked with establishing a system for backing up Kubernetes for recovery if a disaster occurs. For this scenario, it will likely be a cluster-level backup.

Step 1: Back Up the Control Plane Configuration

Use a tool like etcdctl to back up the etcd database storing the cluster’s configuration data. Store copies of authentication files like certificates and tokens in a secure backup directory. If using OpenID Connect (OIDC) for authentication, back up the OIDC configuration, including issuer URL and client IDs, crucial for establishing trust between your EKS cluster and OIDC providers.

Step 2: Back Up Worker Nodes

To back up node configuration, use kubectl to extract information about nodes, namespaces, and resources. This captures configurations of nodes, namespaces, and resources for the backup.

Step 3: Back Up Applications

Use kubectl to extract YAML or JSON files for specific pods to back up pod definitions. For Helm-based applications, use the helm get manifest command to retrieve generated manifest files. Back up ConfigMaps and secrets within a namespace to capture application configurations.

Step 4: Back Up Persistent Volumes

AWS offers built-in snapshot tools to back up persistent volumes. Use the AWS ec2 create-snapshot command to create snapshots of EBS volumes attached to workloads. This creates a snapshot of the specified EBS volume for the backup.

While these examples show backing up individual resources, the process must be repeated many times to account for all resources in the cluster. As resources scale, workflow complexity increases proportionally. Automation and scripting can simplify the process, ensuring comprehensive protection without manual repetition.

Developing an EKS Backup Strategy

The right backup strategy depends on your specific goals like disaster recovery, application mobility, or data protection. These objectives determine which backup levels to use.

Disaster Recovery

EKS point-in-time backups and restores can be created and used in case of outages at the primary site to restore an entire environment to a separate location, meeting disaster recovery needs. This requires a comprehensive cluster-level backup strategy capturing control plane components, nodes, networking, data volumes, and applications.

Application Mobility

Properly implemented application-aware backups provide a way to migrate apps between Kubernetes clusters and cloud providers by performing a point-in-time copy. This requires backing up application-specific data like configurations, databases, and associated persistent storage volumes.

Data Protection

Backup and recovery technology enables point-in-time backups and restores for cloud-native applications, guarding against data corruption or malicious activity. This requires backing up application data volumes, storage snapshots, and control plane components governing access control.

Ransomware Protection

S3 Object Lock can be used to create immutable backups of application data that cannot be deleted or encrypted by ransomware. This requires backing up application volumes to S3 buckets with Object Lock enabled at regular intervals.

While full-cluster backup is comprehensive, granular backup levels like control plane, node, data volume, and application better fit specific use cases. Organizations should combine these approaches based on requirements and application architecture to ensure protection and recovery at suitable levels.

Conclusion

In summary, comprehensive AWS EKS backup typically combines five levels: cluster, control plane, node, data volume, and application-level backup. Cluster-level backup delivers the most complete protection for full disaster recovery. More granular backup levels cater to specific use cases like application mobility across clusters or guarding application data against malicious activity.

Implementing EKS backup involves backing up control plane components like the API server and etcd database, worker node configurations, pod definitions, and taking snapshots of persistent storage volumes. As complexity increases with scale, automation and scripting simplify backup workflows.

An organization’s backup strategy should align to goals for disaster recovery, application mobility, or data protection. These objectives determine which backup levels to utilize. For example, disaster recovery depends on cluster-level backup for full environment restoration while application mobility relies on portable application data backups.

As EKS environments expand to support more diverse workloads, comprehensive data protection and disaster recovery become essential. The right combination of backup levels and automation provides failsafe EKS infrastructure along with the agility to adapt to new requirements.