Velero 1.14: Backup and Disaster Recovery Excellence

Introduction

Backups only matter twice: the day you test restores, and the day you need them. In Kubernetes, the hard part isn’t creating backup objects—it’s making backups fast enough to run often, restores reliable enough to trust, and workflows repeatable across clusters.

Velero 1.14, released on October 15, 2025, focuses on those operational realities: faster backups/restores (including incremental and parallelism), improved storage/plugin integration, and tighter DR workflows for production clusters.

Why this matters in practice

• RPO/RTO improvements: faster backup and restore paths directly translate to better recovery objectives.
• Less “backup tax”: performance and compression improvements reduce the resource and storage cost of doing backups properly.
• Repeatable DR: better cross-cluster restore and validation supports real drills instead of one-off heroics.

Backup Performance Improvements

• Parallel backup processing enables concurrent backup of multiple resources, reducing backup time by up to 70% for large clusters.
• Incremental backup support efficiently backs up only changed data, dramatically reducing backup size and duration for frequent backups.
• Compression improvements reduce backup storage requirements by up to 60% with advanced compression algorithms.
• Selective backup enhancements enable precise resource selection with label selectors, annotations, and namespace filters for targeted backups.

Enhanced Restore Capabilities

1. Parallel restore processing enables faster restoration by restoring multiple resources concurrently with dependency management.
2. Selective restore improvements provide fine-grained control over which resources to restore, enabling partial cluster recovery.
3. Namespace mapping enhancements enable flexible namespace remapping during restore for multi-environment disaster recovery scenarios.
4. Resource transformation capabilities enable modification of resources during restore for environment-specific configurations.

Storage Integration

• Multi-cloud support improvements provide seamless backup and restore across AWS, Azure, GCP, and on-premises storage with unified interface.
• Object storage optimizations improve performance for S3, Azure Blob, and GCS with better batching and retry logic.
• Volume snapshot enhancements provide better integration with cloud provider volume snapshot APIs for faster volume backups.
• Backup storage efficiency improvements enable better organization and lifecycle management of backup artifacts.

Plugin Ecosystem

1. Volume snapshot plugins expansion supports more volume snapshot providers including cloud-native and on-premises solutions.
2. Object storage plugins improvements enable integration with additional object storage backends and protocols.
3. Custom plugins framework enhancements make it easier to develop and integrate custom backup and restore plugins.
4. Plugin management improvements provide better plugin discovery, installation, and configuration management.

Disaster Recovery Features

• Restore validation automatically validates backup integrity before restore operations to prevent data corruption.
• Disaster recovery workflows provide predefined workflows for common disaster recovery scenarios.
• Cross-cluster restore enables restoring backups from one cluster to another for disaster recovery and migration scenarios.
• Backup scheduling improvements provide flexible scheduling with cron expressions and backup retention policies.

Upgrade Checklist (1.13 → 1.14)

• CRDs first: kubectl apply -k github.com/vmware-tanzu/velero/config/crd?ref=v1.14.0.
• Plugins: Upgrade provider plugins alongside the controller; keep versions in sync with your cloud (AWS v1.8, Azure v1.8, GCP v1.12).
• Bucket policy: Verify object-lock/retention policies before enabling incremental backups to avoid denied writes.
• Snapshot class: Reconfirm VolumeSnapshotClass bindings after upgrade; set --features=EnableCSI where applicable.
• Restore validation: Enable preflight validation and run a test restore of a small namespace after rollout.

Getting Started

# Install Velero CLI
brew install velero

# Install Velero on cluster
velero install \
    --provider aws \
    --plugins velero/velero-plugin-for-aws:v1.8.0 \
    --bucket velero-backups \
    --secret-file ./credentials-velero

# Create backup
velero backup create backup-name --include-namespaces production

# Schedule backup
velero schedule create daily-backup --schedule="0 2 * * *" --include-namespaces production

Summary

Velero 1.14 continues to be the industry standard for Kubernetes backup and disaster recovery, providing teams with reliable, efficient, and flexible protection for their critical workloads.