One of the greatest difficulties of running mission-critical applications in Kubernetes is ensuring they are highly available and resilient against outages. 

Companies lean on strong business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) technology and practices to ensure their critical applications are always available. For applications running on premises, in virtual machines (VMs), or in clouds, it isn’t difficult to create a stable, reliable foundation for building applications. Most IT organizations know how to provide BCDR for applications in these “traditional” environments, and there are plenty of enterprise BCDR offerings available on the market.

Cloud-native container and VM environments running on Kubernetes work differently. Generally, in traditional environments, applications are linked to the storage they live on, so protecting the storage is as good as protecting the application. For Kubernetes, any given storage environment could be home to clusters containing the resources and components for multiple different applications. Businesses adopting containers and VMs on Kubernetes can’t simply use the same BCDR tools they use for traditional environments because of this fundamental difference in application architecture. To ensure availability and resiliency, a solution must be able to recover at the application level.