Red Hat®
Kubernetes
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Amazon Web ServicesRed Hat OpenShift introduces Regional disaster recovery for stateful applications
Numerous enterprises opt to deploy their mission-critical stateful applications on the Red Hat OpenShift platform. These applications come with imperative business requirements such as high availability, data security, disaster recovery, stringent performance SLAs, and operations across hybrid/multi-cloud environments. In this discussion, our focus will be directed towards one of these critical aspects.
This article delves into disaster recovery (DR), which is gaining prominence as a pressing concern in the Kubernetes community. This shift is driven by the platform’s increasing support for stateful applications, a departure from the predominantly stateless applications commonly deployed until now. The ultimate objective is to ensure seamless operations in the event of a datacenter, availability zone, or regional outage, thereby ensuring business continuity.
In alignment with this objective, OpenShift has expanded its disaster recovery solutions by introducing the Regional-DR solution. This solution is founded on two key OpenShift products: Cluster management facilitated by Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management (RHACM) and persistent data storage provided by Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation (RHODF).
Regional Disaster Recovery
The Regional Disaster Recovery (Regional-DR) solution is specifically designed to safeguard your applications from a variety of large-scale failures and potential disasters, such as datacenter outages. It stands out as the most adaptable and unrestricted disaster recovery solution offered by Red Hat OpenShift. This methodology is built upon the foundation of dual independent clusters situated in two geographically separate datacenters. Importantly, failures in one cluster or datacenter do not impact the other, ensuring a resilient disaster recovery solution.
Due to the asynchronous nature of data replication, application performance remains unaffected, and there are no constraints on network or latency for deployment. This solution is available across all platforms supported by OpenShift and RHODF, whether on-premises or in public clouds. The disaster recovery protection is fine-tuned at the application level, and operations such as failover and failback exclusively affect the designated applications without disrupting the remainder of the cluster.
Two crucial metrics guide disaster recovery solutions: the recovery point objective (RPO) and the recovery time objective (RTO). RPO is determined by the acceptable level of data loss an application can tolerate in a disaster scenario, while RTO represents the allowable downtime for the application.
