Backing up a Kubernetes cluster whose nodes can't reach anything

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In October 2026 our cloud provider lost two of its three availability zones within a few days. The production cluster was still there, and its API server answered over VPN, but the surviving worker nodes had no internet access: the NAT gateway lived in a dead zone. The provider’s object storage was read-only.

We needed a full backup of the cluster before deciding where to restore it. The usual way is to install Velero into the cluster, but that was impossible here: nodes couldn’t pull the Velero image, and they couldn’t reach any object storage to write to.

Disaster-Recovery on Galust Arakelyan

Backing up a Kubernetes cluster whose nodes can't reach anything