Best Practices for Multi-Region Apache Kafka® Disaster Recovery in the Cloud (Active/Passive)

In the public cloud, regional and availability zone (AZ) downtime and data loss can result in businesses losing considerable revenue and damaging their reputation by halting operations entirely. As enterprise companies move to the cloud to run their most critical workloads, the need for a business continuity or disaster recovery (DR) plan is critical.

If your business depends on Apache Kafka® to run mission-critical workloads or customer-facing applications, then you need a multi-region DR plan for your Kafka deployment. If disaster strikes—catastrophic hardware failure, software failure, power outage, denial of service attack, or any other event that causes one region to fail completely—your Kafka architecture continues running in another region until service is restored. A multi-region DR plan ensures that your data streaming applications continue to operate even if a whole region fails.

In this white paper, we provide a holistic overview of an active-passive multi-region DR solution based on the capabilities of Confluent Cloud, the only fully managed, cloud-native service for Apache Kafka. Using Confluent Cloud and features like Cluster Linking and Schema Linking, we will show:

• How to architect a multi-region deployment
• How to failover when a regional outage strikes
• What to do when the region recovers