The SRE Dream: Rehearsable Disaster Recovery for Kubernetes

Kubernetes gives us self-healing clusters but not self-healing applications. Outages still happen because configs drift or dependencies change or storage and networking behave differently across environments. Recent incidents like the Cloudflare outage show how tiny inconsistencies can ripple into large failures. AI pipelines face similar risks because training jobs, feature stores and serving stacks all carry code and state that must recover together. When recovery cannot be rehearsed teams only discover these issues during a real failure.

This is where RackWare SWIFT helps. It makes Kubernetes and AI pipeline recovery testable anytime without touching production.

Why Kubernetes DR fails silently

Most DR tooling captures storage but misses the rest of the application graph. A correct recovery must rebuild StatefulSets, Deployments, Services, ConfigMaps, Secrets, CRDs, PVCs and networking rules with all inter service relationships. A DR plan is incomplete unless it regenerates the full dependency tree of an application exactly as production sees it. A snapshot is not enough when a different node pool rejects pods or a storage class mismatch prevents volumes from attaching.

Rehearsal is what makes DR trustworthy

SREs (Site Reliability Engineers) run fire drills for everything except DR because DR testing has always been risky. It can overwrite production resources or require hand crafted scripts. Most teams skip it and hope the real failover works. Hope is not a strategy.

SWIFT removes this friction. It builds an application aware package that can be replayed into any cluster including a safe sandbox. Moreover, SWIFT can provision DR resources in automated fashion. This lets teams verify recovery behaviour ahead of time including storage mapping, network alignment, secrets placement, and image versions. For AI and ML pipelines it ensures the training environment notebooks vector stores and model serving endpoints can be reconstructed identically in a second location.

A simple repeatable rehearsal cycle

• Capture the application state at chosen intervals including state and configuration.

• Replicate only deltas to the DR cluster – in cloud or different local datacenter region.

• Clone the application into an isolated namespace or cluster without disturbing production.

• Observe the recovered system with smoke tests, chaos injections or upgrade rehearsals.

• Refine and repeat whenever needed since rehearsal becomes a fast repeatable action rather than a long project.

Rehearsability is not just an engineering benefit. It reduces operational risk and builds confidence in every deployment, upgrade and compliance review.

Why this matters now

Applications are more state heavy, more distributed and more latency sensitive than ever. Regulatory pressure for resilience is increasing. AI workloads are becoming part of business critical systems and need the same continuity guarantees as transactional workloads. In this environment, the ability to simulate a failover safely is a competitive advantage.

A DR system you cannot practice is a DR system you will fail with. SWIFT turns recovery into a confident repeatable engineering workflow for containers. Reliability becomes something teams can measure rather than assume.

About the author

Aniket H. Kulkarni is Vice President of Engineering at RackWare. His work focuses on cloud native resilience, multi cloud portability and enterprise scale Kubernetes modernization.