The business imperative of having resilience for cloud-native applications demands the need for Kubernetes and Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE) empowers development teams to efficiently build and manage scalable containerized applications. But as businesses expand and application complexity grows, so do the risks of downtime, misconfiguration, or regional outages.
To address these challenges head-on, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure introduces Full Stack Disaster Recovery (FSDR)—a fully automated, orchestrated solution designed to protect not just your Kubernetes clusters, but your entire OCI stack. From compute and storage to networking and databases, FSDR makes disaster recovery an integral part of your cloud strategy, ensuring high availability, business continuity, and peace of mind in the face of the unexpected.
Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes
Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE) is a fully managed, scalable, and highly available service that you can use to deploy your containerized applications to the cloud. Use OKE when your development team wants to reliably build, deploy, and manage cloud-native applications. You specify the compute resources that your applications require, and OKE provisions them on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure in an existing OCI tenancy.
In today’s world ensuring the resilience and availability of your Kubernetes clusters is crucial. While Oracle Kubernetes Engine (OKE) provides a robust managed service, adding a Disaster Recovery (DR) layer using OCI Full Stack DR can further protect your infrastructure from unexpected downtimes.
The goal of OKE Disaster Recovery is to ensure high availability, business continuity, and minimal downtime in the event of:
- Regional failure (data center/region outage)
- Infrastructure failures (e.g., compute or network)
- Accidental deletion or misconfiguration
- Natural disasters or compliance-driven separation
OCI FSDR stands for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Full Stack Disaster Recovery.
- It’s a fully managed disaster recovery service that lets you protect and recover entire applications and infrastructure stacks across OCI regions with just a few clicks.
- Think of OCI FSDR as a “Disaster Recovery remote control” for your entire Oracle Cloud setup. Whether it’s compute, storage, networking, databases, or applications, OCI FSDR automates and orchestrates the entire failover and failback process in case something goes wrong (like a natural disaster, outage, or cyberattack).
What Does It Protect?
- Virtual machines & containers
- Storage volumes
- Network setups (VCN, gateways, load balancers)
- Databases (Autonomous, Exadata, MySQL, etc.
- Applications and services
Key Benefits
- End-to-end orchestration of disaster recovery
- Cross-region failover in minutes
- Point-and-click simplicity—no scripting needed
- Ensures compliance with RTO/RPO goals
- Supports testing without impacting production
Managing disaster recovery (DR) for containerized workloads running in Oracle Kubernetes Engine (OKE) can be complex—but with OCI Full Stack Disaster Recovery (FSDR), it’s easier than ever.
You’re running apps in OKE clusters, and you want to ensure high availability and business continuity—even if an entire OCI region goes down. That’s where OCI FSDR comes in.
FSDR helps you to:
- Run DR Drills (for compliance & testing)
- Perform Switchovers (planned events like maintenance)
- Failover Automatically (in case of outages)
Why Use FSDR for OKE?
Without FSDR
- You’d manually replicate OKE configs and cluster states across regions.
- You’d write scripts to handle networking, storage, and load balancer changes.
- You’d manually test your DR setup.
With FSDR
- All of this is automated and orchestrated.
- FSDR ensures your OKE clusters, volumes, and networking are ready in the DR region.
- You can test without risking production.
What Does FSDR Handle?
For OKE workloads, FSDR orchestrates:
- OKE cluster definitions
- Persistent volumes (OCVS / Block Storage)
- Load balancers and public IPs
- ConfigMaps and Secrets (if managed properly)
- Network infrastructure (VCNs, gateways, subnets)
How It Works?
- Set Up Source & DR Sites (e.g., Ashburn → Phoenix)
- Register Resources: FSDR discovers your OKE clusters, volumes, and configs.
- Create DR Plan: Define the order of failover/switchover steps.
- Schedule Drills: Run non-disruptive simulations to validate your DR.
- Failover or Switchover: Click-and-go action when needed.
Architecture
The diagram below shows OKE deployed for cross-region disaster recovery, fully prepared for drills, failovers, or switchovers. OCI Full Stack DR handles resource and container image backups to a standby OKE cluster, while Autonomous Data Guard and OCI storage replication ensure database and volume continuity.
The illustration below shows OKE after a planned switchover, fully orchestrated by OCI Full Stack DR. The standby region’s OKE cluster is now active, with load balancer backend sets updated accordingly.
Full Stack DR automatically updates the DR roles across regions and prepares the environment for a drill, failback, or switchback in the opposite direction.
OCI Full Stack DR helps ensure your disaster recovery plans keep pace with evolving infrastructure. Use the built-in precheck to non-intrusively validate your DR setup and catch issues early—before they impact recovery.
With one click, you can run non-disruptive DR drills that simulate failovers, launching cloned infrastructure in the standby region. After validation, everything is automatically cleaned up—no manual steps, no downtime.
Non-Disruptive DR Validation Made Simple with Full Stack DR
OCI Full Stack DR helps ensure your disaster recovery plans keep pace with evolving infrastructure. Use the built-in precheck to non-intrusively validate your DR setup and catch issues early—before they impact recovery.
With one click, you can run non-disruptive DR drills that simulate failovers, launching cloned infrastructure in the standby region. After validation, everything is automatically cleaned up—no manual steps, no downtime
Conclusion
With OCI Full Stack Disaster Recovery, Oracle brings a transformative solution to Kubernetes-based environments that eliminate the complexities of traditional DR while raising the bar for automation, reliability, and scalability. Businesses running critical workloads on OKE can now protect their applications with just a few clicks, without the need for custom scripts or manual oversight.
Whether it’s running compliance drills, managing planned maintenance, or responding to unforeseen outages, FSDR ensures operational continuity. By simplifying recovery and minimizing disruption, Oracle empowers organizations to shift their focus from fire-fighting outages to driving innovation. In a world where uptime equals trust, OKE with FSDR is a strategic advantage.
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