For years, platform engineers have shared the same quiet nightmare: backing up EKS at scale. As clusters grow and teams stay lean, disaster recovery stops being optional and becomes mandatory. Until recently, this usually meant Velero pain, custom scripts, manually managed S3 buckets, and constant anxiety about whether your persistent volumes matched cluster state. It worked, but it was fragile, time-consuming, and easy to get wrong.
The Turning Point: November 10, 2025
AWS closed a long-standing gap by introducing native Amazon EKS support in AWS Backup. This isn’t a minor feature drop—it’s a shift from DIY backup engineering to managed reliability.
Here’s why this matters.
Why Native EKS Backup is a Game-Changer
1. Composite Recovery Points (the missing piece)
Previously, EKS backups were fragmented:
- Cluster configs in one place
- EBS snapshots somewhere else
- Hope holding everything together
AWS Backup now captures cluster state + persistent storage (EBS, EFS, S3) as a single, consistent recovery point. No more guessing if your data and manifests are in sync.
2. One Pane of Glass
If you already use AWS Backup for EC2, RDS, or DynamoDB, EKS backups will feel familiar.
- Same workflows, policies, and visibility
- No extra controllers
- No per-cluster Velero babysitting
3. Policy-Driven, Not Script-Driven
Instead of CronJobs inside your clusters, you define Backup Plans:
“Back up every 6 hours. Retain for 30 days.”
AWS handles scheduling, encryption, immutability, and lifecycle management automatically. This is what “set and forget” is supposed to look like.
4. Restores Without the Stress
Restores no longer feel like a gamble. You can:
- Restore an entire cluster
- Recover a single namespace
- Roll back individual persistent volumes
- Restore into a brand-new EKS cluster as part of the process
That’s real operational confidence.
Why This Matters Now
Native EKS backup is more than protection against accidental deletion. It provides a safety net for:
- Cluster upgrades (e.g., 1.30 → 1.31)
- AMI rollouts that fail
- Security patches
- Kubernetes API changes
For production EKS, this feature quietly changes how teams sleep at night. AWS didn’t just add a backup option; they removed a category of operational stress.
Practical Guide: Enabling Native EKS Backups
If you already have an EKS cluster, follow these steps:
- Navigate to your AWS Backup resource, go to Settings, then Configure Resource. Include your EKS cluster as a protected resource.
- Go to Protected Resources, click Create On-Demand Backup.
- Create a custom IAM role for backup, attaching:
- AWSBackupServiceRolePolicyForBackup
- AWSBackupServiceRolePolicyForRestores
Example role: EKS-BACKUP-ROLE-EXAMPLE
- Start the backup. You can verify progress in the Backup or EKS page.
Restoring Your EKS Cluster
- In AWS Backup, navigate to Protected Resources and select the Resource ID of the cluster. Choose the composite recovery point and click Restore.
- Configure restore options:
- Scope: entire cluster or a namespace
- Destination: original cluster, existing cluster, or new cluster
For this walkthrough, we restore into a new cluster to demonstrate full capabilities.
Select storage resources to include. AWS Backup supports EBS, EFS, and S3 storage for persistent data.
AWS Backup provisions the cluster and restores workloads based on your configuration.
This workflow doesn’t replace GitOps or careful upgrade strategies, but it provides a reliable safety net for runtime recovery.
Considerations & Best Practices
Even with native EKS backup, there are important points:
- Not all Kubernetes resources are restored exactly as is, especially external integrations
- Restore time depends on PV size and data footprint
- AWS Backup costs apply for snapshots, storage, and retention
- This complements GitOps, but doesn’t replace it
Final Thoughts
Native Amazon EKS support in AWS Backup removes much of the complexity that platform teams previously managed manually. It delivers:
- Consistent, policy-driven backups
- Predictable restores
- No additional controllers or operational overhead
For production EKS environments, it significantly reduces the risk and stress associated with cluster level failures while keeping operations simple and predictable. Platform teams finally have a set-and-forget safety net for backups and restores.
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