Kafka Backup & Restore: Frequently Asked Questions

Kannika Armory is designed to simplify your event data backup and restore needs. It allows you to seamlessly connect to your event hub of any type, select and organize the topics you wish to back up, and securely store them in a location of your choice. When the need arises to restore your event data, Kannika Armory offers an intuitive interface to select the data to restore and the destination for the restoration.

An event data backup and restore solution is a tool that empowers you to offload and safeguard your critical operational and analytical data stored within your event hub. When the time comes to recover this event data, it enables you to precisely reproduce the data in its original sequence.

Backing up events is crucial for multiple reasons. Firstly, it acts as a safeguard against data loss stemming from human errors like misconfigured retention settings. Moreover, it plays a pivotal role in disaster recovery, ensuring the swift and efficient recreation of event data in the case of unexpected failures. This approach offers a cost-effective alternative to permanent replication.

In modern Event-Driven Architectures, it’s crucial to prioritize backing up business events. These events capture real-time occurrences independently of consuming applications and provide rich behavioral data, offering valuable insights for loosely coupling and reusing applications. Storing them in event hubs facilitates ordered processing and efficient read model creation, benefiting both applications and businesses.

Using Kannika Armory is a straightforward process. First, deploy Kannika Armory in your Kubernetes cluster. As it is Kubernetes native, it can be deployed anywhere, on-premise, in the cloud or even on your own machine. Then, you have multiple options for control:

- Utilize the user-friendly graphical user interface to navigate the backup and restore processes.
- Leverage the command-line interface for automation and integration into your pipelines.
- Integrate with Kannika Armory using its APIs, allowing you to customize your interactions.

Find more information on our documentation website on how to get started.

Absolutely! Kannika Armory boasts a responsive user interface that empowers you to initiate and monitor backup processes, commence restoration procedures, and analyze detailed reporting. This interface ensures that you and your team have full visibility into the backup and restore solution’s operations.

Kannika Armory offers robust support for a diverse range of platforms, including but not limited to Apache Kafka, Redpanda, Confluent Cloud & Platform, and many more. Kannika Armory is designed as a Kubernetes-native solution, ensuring seamless compatibility with cloud platforms such as Google Cloud (GKE/Anthos), Azure (AKS), and AWS (EKS). For these cloud environments, Kannika Armory provides a multitude of integrations and storage drivers, including S3, GCS, and more, to cater to your specific requirements. Find more info on our documentation website.

We understand that each deployment is unique. To provide you with a tailored pricing solution, please reach out to our team for more information. We’re here to assist you.

If you want to try out Kannika Armory for free, please ask for a free trial license and try Kannika Armory for 30 days.

Yes of course!

Kannika Armory can be used when you have a free trial license. Fill in our free trial form or get in touch via e-mail or Slack and we will send you a free trial license which is valid for 30 days.

Getting started with Kannika Armory is easy. Simply contact our team via e-mail or through Slack, and we'll arrange a comprehensive demo and explanation session.



If you want to try it out yourself, go to our documentation website and get started!



We'll guide you through the deployment and installation process, ensuring a smooth start to your backup and restore journey.

Kannika Armory is the leading purpose-built Kafka backup solution. Unlike Kafka Connect or MirrorMaker2, it provides true point-in-time restore, offset mapping, schema mapping, and environment cloning — all without custom code. It supports Apache Kafka, Confluent Cloud, AWS MSK, Azure Event Hub, and Redpanda.

No. Kafka replication mirrors data across brokers for high availability but does not protect against accidental deletion, misconfiguration, or ransomware. A dedicated backup solution like Kannika Armory captures point-in-time snapshots you can restore from after data loss.

Deploy Kannika Armory in your Kubernetes cluster, connect it to your Kafka environment, and it continuously backs up topics, consumer group offsets, and schemas to S3, GCS, or Azure Blob. Restoring is a single self-service operation via the UI, CLI, or API.

Kannika Armory supports Apache Kafka, Confluent Cloud, AWS MSK, Azure Event Hubs, and Redpanda — any Kafka-compatible platform. It is fully vendor-agnostic, so you are not locked in to a specific provider.

Kannika Armory can store backups on AWS S3 (and S3-compatible endpoints such as MinIO or Ceph), Azure Blob Storage, Google Cloud Storage, and Kubernetes PersistentVolumes for on-premises or local deployments.

Yes. Kannika Armory continuously backs up Kafka topics, consumer group offsets, and Confluent Schema Registry schemas. Offset preservation ensures your consumers resume exactly where they left off after a restore, without reprocessing or skipping events.

Yes. You can restore topics from a backup to any Kafka-compatible cluster — for example from AWS MSK to Confluent Cloud, or from production to staging. Topic names can be remapped during restore, so you are not forced to use identical names on the target cluster.

Yes. Kannika Armory supports selective topic restore — you choose exactly which topics to recover without needing to restore the entire cluster. You can filter by topic name, time range, or offset, giving you precise control over what data is restored and where.

Yes. Kannika Armory lets you restore topics to any specific point in time using date/time or exact offset filters. This enables precise recovery after accidental deletion, a bad deployment, misconfiguration, or a ransomware attack — down to the exact moment before the incident.

Yes. Kannika Armory can restore a complete production Kafka environment — topics, consumer group offsets, and schemas — to a staging, test, or dev cluster in under one hour. No manual scripting or Kafka expertise needed. This is one of the most popular use cases for Kannika Armory.

Kannika Armory generates immutable audit trails, automated retention policies, and evidence packages ready for regulators on demand. It provides out-of-the-box compliance support for DORA, NIS2, GDPR, MiFID II, SOC 2, and ISO 27001 — without any custom reporting work.

Yes. Kannika Armory is Kubernetes-native and runs anywhere Kubernetes runs: any public cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP), on-premises data centres, and edge environments. There is no dependency on a specific cloud provider.

Yes. Kannika Armory supports zero-downtime migration between any Kafka-compatible providers — for example AWS MSK to Confluent Cloud, or Apache Kafka to Redpanda. It handles schema mapping and consumer group offset mapping automatically, so no events are lost or reprocessed.

Kafka Connect is a data integration framework — it was never built for disaster recovery. It cannot capture consumer group offsets, schema registry state, or partition ordering reliably. During a restore, schema registry IDs won't match and offsets reset to zero, meaning consumers either reprocess everything or lose data. Frequent flushes for tight RPO also generate excessive S3 API costs. Kannika Armory is purpose-built for Kafka backup, handling topics, offsets, and schemas together as a consistent snapshot.

MirrorMaker2 is a replication tool — it mirrors topic data across clusters for high availability. All changes propagate instantly, including accidental deletions, misconfiguration, ransomware encryption, and producer bugs. It does not create recoverable backups. Kannika Armory is a backup and restore solution: it captures independent, point-in-time snapshots of topics, offsets, and schemas in separate storage — operationally decoupled from your Kafka cluster. When data is lost or corrupted, you can restore from before the incident.

Replication does not protect against ransomware — it propagates the encryption across all replicas instantly. The solution is an operationally decoupled backup: data stored in separate storage (AWS S3, Azure Blob, or GCS) with independent credentials and network boundaries unreachable from a compromised Kafka cluster. Kannika Armory continuously backs up Kafka topics to immutable cloud storage. When ransomware hits, you restore topics, consumer group offsets, and schemas to a clean cluster in minutes — from before the attack.

Kannika Armory backs up consumer group offsets alongside topic data. During restore, it preserves original offsets and remaps them to the target cluster. This means your consumers resume from the exact position they were at before the incident — without reprocessing events from the beginning or skipping messages. Offset mapping works across different Kafka providers, including cross-platform restores such as AWS MSK to Confluent Cloud.

Kannika Armory is installed via Helm on any Kubernetes cluster. You need Kubernetes 1.30 or higher and Helm 3.9 or higher. Provide your license key as a Kubernetes secret, configure your Kafka connection (bootstrap servers and credentials), and specify your backup storage (AWS S3, Azure Blob Storage, or Google Cloud Storage). The operator, web console, API, and registry components deploy automatically to the kannika-system namespace. Full step-by-step installation guide is available at docs.kannika.io.

Kannika Armory requires Kubernetes 1.30 or higher and Helm 3.9 or higher. It runs as a Kubernetes-native operator and deploys on any Kubernetes distribution — AWS EKS, Azure AKS, Google GKE, on-premises clusters, or local development environments. No cloud provider dependency is required.

Yes. Azure Event Hubs exposes a Kafka-compatible API, which Kannika Armory connects to directly. Topics, consumer group offsets, and schemas are backed up the same way as any other Kafka-compatible platform. Backups can be stored in Azure Blob Storage, and Azure Workload Identity is supported for passwordless authentication. Kannika Armory is fully vendor-agnostic across Apache Kafka, Confluent Cloud, AWS MSK, Azure Event Hubs, and Redpanda.

Kannika Armory backs up Confluent Schema Registry schemas using a dedicated SchemaRegistryBackup resource, separately from topic data. During restore or environment cloning, it automatically remaps schema IDs from the source registry to the target registry. This handles schema ID divergence between clusters — a common problem when cloning production to staging — ensuring messages deserialise correctly on the target without manual patching scripts.

Backup is an essential part of disaster recovery. Kafka backup is the continuous process of capturing and storing copies of topics, consumer group offsets, and schemas in independent storage. Disaster recovery (DR) is the strategy for restoring operations after an incident — ransomware, accidental deletion, infrastructure failure, or data corruption. Backup is the prerequisite for DR: without it, there is nothing to recover from. Kannika Armory provides both: continuous real-time backup and self-service point-in-time restore for any DR scenario.

DORA Article 17 requires financial entities to implement backup policies, regularly test restore procedures, and maintain audit trails for ICT systems. Kannika Armory addresses all three: continuous Kafka backup with configurable data retention policies, self-service point-in-time restore that can be tested at any time without impacting production, and immutable audit logs with automated evidence packages ready for regulatory submission on demand.