Chapter 1. Backup and restore

As a cluster administrator, you might need to stop an OpenShift Container Platform cluster for a period and restart it later. Some reasons for restarting a cluster are that you need to perform maintenance on a cluster or want to reduce resource costs. In OpenShift Container Platform, you can perform a graceful shutdown of a cluster so that you can easily restart the cluster later.

You must back up etcd data before shutting down a cluster; etcd is the key-value store for OpenShift Container Platform, which persists the state of all resource objects. An etcd backup plays a crucial role in disaster recovery. In OpenShift Container Platform, you can also replace an unhealthy etcd member.

When you want to get your cluster running again, restart the cluster gracefully.

You might run into several situations where OpenShift Container Platform does not work as expected, such as:

You can always recover from a disaster situation by restoring your cluster to its previous state using the saved etcd snapshots.

As a cluster administrator, you can back up and restore applications running on OpenShift Container Platform by using the OpenShift API for Data Protection (OADP).

OADP backs up and restores Kubernetes resources and internal images, at the granularity of a namespace, by using the version of Velero that is appropriate for the version of OADP you install, according to the table in Downloading the Velero CLI tool. OADP backs up and restores persistent volumes (PVs) by using snapshots or Restic. For details, see OADP features.