K8up: Declarative Backups for Kubernetes
Shriira Press
A Kubernetes operator that turns backup into a declarative, self-service resource — built on Restic, driven by YAML.
Welcome to K8up: Declarative Backups for Kubernetes.
K8up — pronounced "ketchup" — is a CNCF Sandbox project that brings backup and restore into the Kubernetes API itself. Instead of cron jobs, bespoke scripts, and someone remembering to test the restore, you write a Schedule object, point it at object storage, and the operator does the rest: it finds your persistent volumes, runs Restic against them, prunes old snapshots, verifies repository integrity, and exports metrics so you know it all worked. This book starts with the problem of protecting stateful workloads and the Restic engine that K8up wraps, then builds up through the operator's architecture, the family of custom resources that drive it — Backup, Restore, Archive, Check, and Prune — and the Schedule resource that ties them together with deterministic randomized timing. From there it covers application-aware backups, where K8up streams a pg_dump or mysqldump straight into the repository, before closing with restore strategies, retention policy, and a practical guide to running K8up in production. By the end you will be able to design and operate a complete, self-service backup system for a cluster.
This title is part of the ShriIra library and is free to read in full, right here — our small contribution to making world-class knowledge easy to reach.
A note on reading it: open the Contents menu at the top of the reader to jump between chapters, use the Aa menu to set a comfortable text size, theme (light, sepia, or night), and single- or two-page layout. Your place is saved automatically, so you can always pick up where you left off.
We hope it serves you well.
— Shriira Press