When people talk about DevOps, Cloud, or Kubernetes, the spotlight is usually on shiny things: slick CI/CD pipelines, microservice deployments, or the latest service mesh. What gets almost no attention? Disaster Recovery (DR). Backups. Failovers. RTOs and RPOs. The unglamorous stuff.
Yet when things inevitably go wrong — and they will — it’s not the cool deployments that save you. It’s the boring, carefully-tested disaster recovery plan.
Why Disaster Recovery Gets Ignored
Let’s be honest: DR doesn’t feel exciting. There’s no dopamine hit in setting up replication policies or writing out a step-by-step recovery runbook. Nobody is bragging at conferences about how many minutes their last DR drill took.
Cool deployments show progress, innovation, and speed. DR feels like insurance — invisible until you need it. That’s why teams skip it, underfund it, or assume cloud providers magically handle it for them.
The Reality Check: Outages Will Happen
No system is immune. Whether it’s:
- A fat-fingered kubectl delete wiping a namespace.
- A region-wide outage at your cloud provider.
- A ransomware attack encrypting your production database.
- Or simply an expired certificate that takes down your login service.
In each case, the only thing standing between you and a very bad day is whether you had backups, failovers, and a plan you’ve actually tested.
The Building Blocks of a Real DR Plan
A solid disaster recovery approach doesn’t have to be overengineered, but it does need these fundamentals:
1. Backups (and Restores, not just Backups)
It’s not enough to “have backups.” You need to verify they can be restored quickly and consistently. Otherwise, they’re just expensive archives.
2. Failover and Redundancy
Where can you switch traffic if your main service is down? Multi-region deployments, secondary databases, or even a simpler warm standby can save hours.
3. Clear RTO and RPO Targets
Recovery Time Objective (RTO) = how fast you need to be back.
Recovery Point Objective (RPO) = how much data you can afford to lose.
Without setting these, you don’t know whether your DR is “good enough.”
4. Runbooks and Rehearsals
Write the steps down. Test them. Run chaos drills. Nobody should have to “figure it out on the fly” at 3 AM.
DR as a Career Saver
Here’s the truth: you might not get promoted for having the world’s most robust backup system. But you will definitely get noticed (in a bad way) if you don’t have one when disaster hits.
Disaster Recovery is rarely a resume bullet point — until the day it saves your company millions, keeps your customers from leaving, or simply lets you sleep better at night. That’s when the “boring” work becomes legendary.
Final Thought
New tech comes and goes. Frameworks change. Deployment methods evolve. But the timeless reality of running systems is this: something will fail. And when it does, the most boring part of your infrastructure is suddenly the most important.
So yes, disaster recovery isn’t sexy. But one day, it might just save your job.
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