As much as Cloud Providers tout their availability and uptime, disasters happen. It’s inevitable. And it’s usually up to you to be prepared. There are services that can help; however, they’re not always “Kubernetes aware”.

Thankfully, the great folks at Heptio open-sourced Ark, a Disaster Recovery tool which works for all the major cloud providers.

I got hands-on with Ark and followed their Azure steps. It was a good start, but didn’t highlight how an actual failover and recovery would look to the operator. I took their steps and created a step-by-step guide to perform a full migration.

Ark support Azure native resources, namely Managed Disk + Snapshots.
You can review those steps here: https://github.com/heptio/ark/blob/master/docs/azure-config.md

Another option would be to use Restic, which performs backups to a local file system. Later, I’ll detail the steps on how to use Restic with Azure.

If you’re looking for Best Practices on supporting Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery for AKS/K8S clusters in Azure, you’re in luck! I wrote a Microsoft article covering this use case, which can be found here:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/aks/operator-best-practices-multi-region