Your Kafka is replicated. Is it backed up?

Why replication is not backup

Four incidents a standby will not save you from.

Cluster Linking and MirrorMaker 2 do their job well: they keep a second cluster in step with production, so you stay online when a site or region fails. That same job is why they cannot protect you from the incidents below. They copy what production does, good or bad.

What a real backup needs

Four tests for your Kafka backup.

If your current setup fails any of these, you have availability, not backup. Use them as a checklist for your next risk review.

• 1. An immutable copy

  Once written, the backup cannot be changed or deleted before its retention ends, not even by an admin. Object storage with object lock is the standard way to get this.

• 2. Separate credentials

  The keys that run production cannot reach the backup. A stolen production key, a script or a careless command should stop at the boundary.

• 3. Point-in-time history

  You can go back to the data as it was before the incident, not just the latest state. That is what lets you recover from a bad write that ran for an hour.

• 4. Tested recovery

  You have restored from it, on a schedule, without touching production. A backup nobody has recovered from is a hope, not a plan, and it is the first thing an auditor will ask about.

How Lascaris handles it

Keep your replication. Add a backup it cannot break.

Lascaris includes backup and recovery as part of the platform. It sits next to the Kafka you already run, so production stays untouched and your Cluster Linking or MirrorMaker 2 setup keeps doing its job.

• Works with any Kafka-protocol source: Confluent, Apache Kafka, Redpanda and MSK.
• Backup data is stored on S3 under object lock, as an immutable copy.
• Standard Kafka consumers read the backup, so replay and reprocessing work with tools you already have.
• Runs inside your own cloud account, on-premise or air-gapped. We can run it for you, or your team runs it with our support.
• Restoring a single topic as of a chosen time into a new topic is planned, not yet available.

Next step

Find out if your Kafka would survive a bad day.

Book a call and we will walk through your current replication, where the gaps are and what a recovery drill would look like for your setup. Or start with the AI Architecture Score to see where your stack stands today.