Kafka Disaster Recovery Readiness Checklist

Six technical areas that determine whether you recover in minutes or hours.

Replication gets your data to a secondary cluster, but without the right preparation, there's no guarantee you'll actually be able to failover smoothly when it matters most. This checklist walks you through all the elements you need to think about to ensure your disaster recovery goes smoothly.

Why We Made This Checklist

Most Kafka teams treat replication as synonymous with disaster recovery, when in reality it only covers one piece of the puzzle.

Replication moves data, but it doesn't automatically switch clients, preserve security and governance, keep schemas compatible, or guarantee your on-call team can execute a failover under pressure.

Teams that recover in minutes have gone beyond replication and addressed six technical areas and centralized how those areas are managed. This checklist distills those areas into a practical review tool you can bring to your next design review, audit, or game day.

What You'll Get

A concise, practitioner-built checklist covering:

• Security and identity parity across clusters
• Topic and schema configuration parity
• Data protection and compliance continuity
• Observability and operational readiness
• Client switching and traffic routing
• Testing and continuous validation

Plus a simple failover runbook sequence you can validate during real disaster recovery drills and incidents.

Who It's For

• Platform and infrastructure engineers
• Kafka and streaming architects
• SRE and reliability teams
• Security and compliance stakeholders
• Engineering leaders accountable for uptime

If Kafka outages impact revenue, customers, or regulatory exposure, this checklist is for you.