Irori and Kannika bring point-in-time Kafka recovery to a Swedish public sector customer

Irori and Kannika are partnering up.

Together, we brought point-in-time Kafka recovery to a Swedish public sector customer.

Multi-broker replication protects you when a node goes down. It does nothing when the real threat is a bad deploy that corrupts messages, a misfired script that empties a topic, or a schema change that silently breaks every downstream consumer. In those scenarios, redundancy just means the bad data exists in three places instead of one.

Closing that gap is what brought Irori and Kannika together. Irori is a Stockholm-based consultancy for event-driven architecture, platform engineering and security, and for this customer they needed more than a copy of the cluster. They needed a way back to a known-good moment.

‍

Why the partnership

The customer needed the ability to restore a specific topic to exactly how it looked at a specific moment. Not the nearest snapshot, and not a full replay from offset zero. That requirement led Irori to Kannika Armory.

Two things made the decision straightforward:

1. Precision. Kannika Armory restores a specific topic to a specific timestamp or offset. When something has actually gone wrong, that is the difference between a scalpel and a sledgehammer.
2. Fit. Kannika Armory ships as a Kubernetes Operator with its own Custom Resource Definitions, so backups, storage, credentials and restores are described as plain Kubernetes manifests. There was no niche tooling to learn and no gap in the customer's existing GitOps workflows: everything is versioned as code and deployed the way everything else already is. The declarative model also removes a whole category of misconfiguration risk, because there is no manual setup step to get wrong.

Beyond the product, the Kannika team was directly involved throughout the engagement. Our co-founders joined support conversations personally and walked the customer through the public roadmap, an approach Irori describes as feeling less like a vendor purchase and more like a partnership.

‍

What point-in-time restore changes day to day

Jacob Danielsson, Kafka Engineer at Irori, was part of the implementation:

"Traditional disaster recovery gives you some peace of mind, but point-in-time restore is what actually changes how you work day to day. We can replay events without doing manual offset math. We just tell it the moment we want and it handles the rest."

Jacob Danielsson, Kafka Engineer at Irori

In production, the setup now runs continuous, near-real-time backups of the production topics, configured once as code. Retention is handled automatically through the same manifests, so nobody has to remember to clean up old backups. And because Kannika Armory runs as just another Operator inside the cluster, it behaves like everything else in the stack.

"From our initial conversations with Irori, there was an immediate connection; it felt as though we had already been working together for years."

Wout Florin, co-founder of Kannika

‍

Backup and restore is infrastructure

If there is one thing we would tell other teams running Kafka, it is that backup and restore deserves to be treated as real infrastructure, not something you bolt on later. Replication faithfully copies your mistakes; a restorable history of your topics is what lets you undo them.

Read Irori's own announcement on irori.se.

‍

About Irori

Irori is a Stockholm-based tech consultancy operating through three specialized subsidiaries, Irori Integration, Irori Platform and Irori Security, delivering event-driven architecture, platform engineering and security expertise to enterprise and public sector clients across Sweden.

Explore the Kannika Sandbox or book a demo to see what point-in-time recovery for Kafka looks like in practice.