In cloud native applications, containers running under Kubernetes often make use of serverless databases or managed database services outside of the cluster. This can speed application development and deployment, but it can further complicate the picture when it comes to data protection and disaster recovery. It is important to make sure that you are capturing all of your application’s state via integrated and consistent snapshots of all of your application’s disparate components. This includes databases, regardless of whether they reside in Kubernetes or the cloud provider’s infrastructure.

Further, applications need to be protected in separate geographies and access domains. While it is usually easy to make serverless components redundant both within and across regions, it is important not to confuse redundancy with true data protection and disaster recovery capability, which protects against human errors and/or intentional harm from bad players. It can also be more difficult to identify failure domains when you are using serverless components than with more traditional infrastructure.