¶ High Availability and Disaster Recovery in SAP Kyma
Ensuring Resilience in SAP Cloud-Native Extensions
As enterprises increasingly adopt cloud-native architectures to extend SAP solutions, Kyma emerges as a robust platform that runs on Kubernetes, enabling microservices and event-driven applications tightly integrated with SAP systems. Ensuring High Availability (HA) and implementing Disaster Recovery (DR) strategies in Kyma deployments is critical to maintaining business continuity, minimizing downtime, and safeguarding data integrity in SAP landscapes.
This article dives into best practices and architectural considerations for achieving HA and DR in SAP Kyma environments.
¶ Understanding High Availability and Disaster Recovery in Kyma
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High Availability refers to designing the system to minimize downtime by eliminating single points of failure, enabling applications and services to remain accessible even during infrastructure faults.
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Disaster Recovery focuses on restoring services and data after catastrophic events, such as data center failures, major outages, or security incidents.
Together, HA and DR strategies ensure Kyma-based SAP extensions operate reliably under various failure scenarios.
¶ Key Challenges in SAP Kyma HA and DR
- Kubernetes Cluster Resilience: Kyma runs on Kubernetes, so cluster design impacts availability.
- Stateful Components: Databases, message brokers, and persistent storage need special handling.
- Distributed Microservices: Complex interactions can propagate failures.
- Integration Points: Dependencies on external SAP systems and APIs require careful orchestration.
- Data Consistency: Ensuring event delivery and data synchronization across replicas or regions.
- Multi-Node Clusters: Deploy Kyma on multi-node Kubernetes clusters spread across multiple availability zones (AZs) to avoid AZ-level failures.
- Control Plane HA: Use managed Kubernetes services (e.g., SAP BTP Kyma runtime, GKE, AKS) offering HA control planes.
- Pod Replication: Ensure critical pods, including Kyma components like API Gateway, Event Bus, and Controllers, have replica sets or deployments with multiple pods.
¶ 2. Load Balancing and Traffic Management
- Use Istio Service Mesh (integrated in Kyma) for intelligent load balancing, automatic failover, and traffic routing.
- Configure readiness and liveness probes to detect unhealthy pods and trigger automated restarts.
- Use highly available managed databases (e.g., SAP HANA Cloud, PostgreSQL with replication) for persistent data.
- Deploy stateful sets with persistent volume claims (PVCs) replicated across zones.
- For messaging, configure Event Mesh or Kafka clusters with replication and failover.
¶ 1. Backup and Restore
- Regularly backup persistent volumes, databases, and Kyma configuration objects (Custom Resource Definitions, secrets, config maps).
- Use Kubernetes-native tools like Velero for cluster backup and restore.
- Ensure backups are stored off-cluster or cross-region.
- Deploy Kyma across multiple geographic regions for geo-redundancy.
- Implement active-active or active-passive deployment strategies based on business needs.
- Synchronize stateful data using database replication or event-driven synchronization.
¶ 3. Automated Failover and Recovery
- Use Kubernetes operators and automation scripts to detect failures and trigger failover workflows.
- Leverage cloud provider tools for disaster recovery orchestration.
¶ Monitoring and Testing for HA and DR
- Implement comprehensive monitoring of cluster health, application performance, and data replication status.
- Regularly test failover scenarios and backup restores to validate recovery procedures.
- Incorporate chaos engineering practices to simulate failures and improve system resilience.
| Aspect |
Best Practice |
| Cluster Architecture |
Multi-node, multi-AZ Kubernetes clusters |
| Kyma Components |
Deploy with replicas, enable health probes |
| Data Persistence |
Use managed HA databases, replicate persistent volumes |
| Backup |
Automate backups with tools like Velero |
| Disaster Recovery |
Multi-region deployments, automated failover |
| Monitoring |
Continuous health checks and alerting |
| Testing |
Scheduled DR drills and chaos engineering |
High availability and disaster recovery are foundational pillars for SAP Kyma deployments, ensuring that mission-critical SAP extensions remain operational and recoverable under adverse conditions. By leveraging Kubernetes best practices, cloud-managed services, and Kyma’s native capabilities like Istio and Event Mesh, SAP developers and operators can build resilient, scalable, and fault-tolerant cloud-native applications.
Embracing these strategies empowers organizations to maximize uptime, protect data integrity, and deliver consistent business value through their SAP Kyma extensions.