Vault Disaster Recovery in EKS: How to Handle It
# 🔐 Vault Disaster Recovery in EKS: How to Handle It If you're running Vault in Kubernetes (EKS) using Raft as the storage backend, one of the most stressful moments is: > ❗ “What happens if a Vault Pod and its PVC are deleted?” In this post, I’ll walk you through a real-world disaster recovery scenario — where a Vault Pod and its persistent volume go missing — and how you can **quickly and safely recover** your Raft-based Vault cluster. --- ## 📆 Environment Setup (Assumptions) - HashiCorp Vault 1.19+ - Deployed on EKS using Helm - Raft as the storage backend (each Vault Pod uses EBS-backed PVC) - 3 Vault Pods: `vault-0`, `vault-1`, `vault-2` - NodeGroup located in a single AZ (e.g., `us-west-1`) --- ## 💥 Failure Scenario: Deleting vault-0 Pod + PVC ```bash kubectl delete pod vault-0 -n vault kubectl delete pvc data-vault-0 -n vault ``` After deletion, the StatefulSet recreates the Pod — but since the PVC is gone, Vault starts in `Initialized: false` state, and cannot be uns...
