FAQ

When is it appropriate to use Ark instead of etcd’s built in backup/restore?

Etcd’s backup/restore tooling is good for recovering from data loss in a single etcd cluster. For example, it is a good idea to take a backup of etcd prior to upgrading etcd istelf. For more sophisticated management of your Kubernetes cluster backups and restores, we feel that Ark is generally a better approach. It gives you the ability to throw away an unstable cluster and restore your Kubernetes resources and data into a new cluster, which you can’t do easily just by backing up and restoring etcd.

Examples of cases where Ark is useful:

• you don’t have access to etcd (e.g. you’re running on GKE)
• backing up both Kubernetes resources and persistent volume state
• cluster migrations
• backing up a subset of your Kubernetes resources
• backing up Kubernetes resources that are stored across multiple etcd clusters (for example if you run a custom apiserver)

Will Ark restore my Kubernetes resources exactly the way they were before?

Yes, with some exceptions. For example, when Ark restores pods it deletes the nodeName from the pod so that it can be scheduled onto a new node. You can see some more examples of the differences in pod_action.go