Cloud-native disaster recovery (DR) and backup solutions are designed to address the specific needs of modern applications built with microservices, containers, and serverless architectures. Unlike legacy systems, which focus on entire virtual machines or physical servers, cloud-native strategies emphasize orchestrating the recovery of distributed application components and their associated data. 

Key principles of cloud-native DR and backup

• Application-centric protection: Rather than just backing up infrastructure, cloud-native solutions capture and restore the entire application, including its data, configuration, and state. This is crucial for complex, multi-component applications orchestrated by platforms like Kubernetes.
• Built-in automation: Automation is central to cloud-native DR. Tools and cloud services use APIs to automate processes like snapshotting, replication, failover, and restoration, which minimizes human intervention and reduces Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs).
• Infrastructure as Code: Workload infrastructure, configurations, and application code are defined in code (e.g., using Terraform or AWS CloudFormation). This ensures that the environment can be consistently and reliably redeployed in the recovery region after a disaster.
• Immutable backups: Advanced security features, such as immutable backups, prevent backup data from being altered or deleted, protecting against threats like ransomware. This adds a vital layer of security to the recovery process.
• Cost efficiency: Cloud-native solutions take advantage of the cloud's elasticity by using a pay-as-you-go model. Organizations can minimize costs by only consuming resources when needed for backups, testing, or actual recovery, rather than maintaining expensive, idle infrastructure. 

Strategies for cloud-native applications

1. Kubernetes backup and recovery

• Cluster state backup: The database, which stores the Kubernetes cluster's entire state, is backed up regularly to restore core cluster configurations.
• Persistent Volume (PV) snapshots: For stateful applications, snapshotting persistent volumes ensures that application data can be restored to a specific point in time.
• Valero (open-source): A popular open-source tool that backs up and restores Kubernetes cluster resources and persistent volumes. It can migrate cluster resources and provide a consistent application state.
• Veeam Kasten: A data management platform specifically built for Kubernetes that offers application-aware backups and facilitates app mobility. 

2. Serverless architecture backup

• Event-driven backup: Rather than continuous monitoring, serverless backup is event-driven. A function is triggered by an event—like a file upload to Amazon S3—to create a backup.
• Cloud-native service backups: Cloud providers offer built-in backup capabilities for their serverless-compatible databases and storage services. For example, Google Cloud has backups for Cloud SQL, and AWS has backups for DynamoDB.
• Managed vendor solutions: For services like MongoDB Atlas, serverless instances come with automatic incremental snapshots and built-in redundancy, so teams can focus on application development rather than backup operations. 

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

• AWS Backup: A centralized service that allows organizations to configure, schedule, and monitor backups for a wide range of AWS services, including EC2, EBS, RDS, and DynamoDB.
• Elastic Disaster Recovery (DRS): Continuously replicates server-hosted applications into AWS, converting them to run natively on AWS during recovery. It uses a "Pilot Light" strategy, replicating data to a low-cost staging area and provisioning full resources only during failover.
• Cross-Region Replication (CRR): For Amazon S3, this feature continuously copies objects to a bucket in a different region, providing a robust, geo-redundant backup strategy. 

Microsoft Azure

• Azure Backup: A cost-effective and scalable service that provides end-to-end backup and recovery solutions. It can protect against ransomware and data deletion with features like multi-factor authentication.
• Azure Site Recovery (ASR): A Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) offering that orchestrates and automates replication across cloud and hybrid environments, allowing applications to fail over to a secondary Azure region.
• Multi-region support: Azure supports global disaster recovery across continents and regions through ASR, allowing customers to meet data residency regulations by replicating data within a country's borders. 

Google Cloud (GCP)

• Backup and DR Service: A centralized, managed, and secure backup and recovery service for cloud and hybrid workloads, protecting data from malicious or accidental deletion.
• Persistent Disk Asynchronous Replication: Offers low-RPO and low-RTO block storage replication for Compute Engine workloads, enabling cross-region active-passive DR.
• Backup for GKE: Provides centralized backup capabilities for Kubernetes Engine clusters, protecting application data, persistent disks, and cluster configurations