Disaster Recovery for Cloud & .NET Systems
Disaster recovery usually fails at restore time, not backup time. Every team has backups. Most teams have never restored from them under realistic conditions. The gap between “we have a backup strategy” and “we can recover in production” is where customers experience downtime, regulators ask uncomfortable questions, and engineers discover that the runbook references a tool that no longer exists.
The articles in this collection treat disaster recovery as a tested capability rather than a documentation artifact. Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) are not aspirational numbers — they are commitments that have to survive a real incident at 2 AM with half the team on holiday. Targets that look reasonable in a planning session quietly become impossible when the actual restore depends on a step nobody has rehearsed.
Azure Kubernetes Service gets specific attention because the failure modes are well-defined. Persistent volumes hold the data; CRDs, manifests, identity mappings, network policies, and RBAC rules hold the rest. Snapshot-based backups capture the disk content but lose the Kubernetes metadata required to bind volumes back to the correct pods in the correct namespaces. Velero solves that problem with predictable schedules, scope filters, and restore tests that can run monthly without disturbing production.
Multi-region failover is the harder topic because the cost grows with the gap between the documented procedure and what teams can actually execute under pressure. Active-passive replication, DNS failover, traffic manager profiles, and the data consistency trade-offs that none of the marketing material discusses are covered in articles grounded in real recovery events rather than constructed scenarios.
The recurring message: a backup you have never restored is not a backup. A failover procedure that has never been executed end-to-end is documentation, not capability. The discipline is testing the recovery often enough that it becomes boring before it becomes urgent.
AKS Disaster Recovery: Why Your Untested Backup Will Fail
Your cluster will fail. The question is not if, but when, and whether you can recover before customers notice. Most organizations discover their backup strategy does not work during an actual outage, when recovery time matters most and manual heroics cannot save you.
If you run Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) in production, you need a recovery plan that engineers can execute half asleep at 2 AM. We will go through what to back up, how Velero works in day-to-day operations, when Azure Backup for AKS is enough, and how to design realistic failover with measurable Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO).
The goal is simple: repeatable recovery procedures you have already tested, not a document that looks good in Confluence but fails during an incident.