Backup of External Dependencies

Applications within OpenShift often rely on services running outside the cluster, such as external databases (e.g., RDS, dedicated Oracle/SQL Server instances), message queues, identity providers, or other legacy systems. OADP/Velero operate within the OpenShift cluster and cannot back up these external services. These require their own native backup solutions.

Physical Infrastructure or Bare-Metal Node Backup:

OADP/Velero do not back up the underlying operating systems of the worker or control plane nodes (RHCOS configurations beyond what's managed by the cluster, boot partitions, etc.), nor the physical hardware or IaaS-level configurations (like VPC settings, firewall rules outside of Kubernetes NetworkPolicies).

Real-time Continuous Data Protection (CDP) or Synchronous Replication:

OADP/Velero provide point-in-time backups. They are not designed for use cases requiring zero Recovery Point Objective (RPO) or near-synchronous data replication between sites. Such requirements are usually met by storage-level synchronous replication or application-level clustering solutions.