Stateful Workload Disaster Recovery#

Stateless workloads are easy to recover – redeploy from Git and they are running. Stateful workloads carry data that cannot be regenerated. Databases, message queues, object stores, and anything with a PersistentVolume needs a deliberate DR strategy that goes beyond “we have Velero.”

The fundamental challenge: you must capture data at a point in time where the application state is consistent, replicate that data to a recovery site, and restore it in the correct order. Get any of these wrong and you recover corrupted data or a broken dependency chain.