Open Stack

> Hi Murali, welcome to the OpenStack community. Some comments inline...
Hi Jay,
Thanks for your comments. I have been involved with OpenStack since Diablo time frame, but mostly monitoring the traffic. Always great to be part of the community. 

My comments are inline.
> 
> On 08/28/2013 06:12 PM, Murali Balcha wrote:
>> Hello Stackers,
>> 
>> We would like to introduce a new project Raksha, a Data Protection As a
>> Service (DPaaS) for OpenStack Cloud.
>> 
>> Raksha’s primary goal is to provide a comprehensive Data Protection for
>> OpenStack by leveraging Nova, Swift, Glance and Cinder. Raksha has
>> following key features:
>> 
>> 1.Provide an enterprise grade data protection for OpenStack based clouds
> 
> What is "enterprise grade"? Any time I hear that term, I think of Deloitte and Touche salespeople trying to convince some sucker CIO that "expensive == good". I'd prefer to just leave the whole "enterprise" thing for the marketing folks and stick to the specific engineering features ;)
 
I hear you. Will take out the market jargon and stick to technical specifications.
> 
>> 2.Tenant administered backups and restores
>> 
>> 3.Application consistent backups
> 
> Can you expand on this a bit? Data is backed up, not applications... that's what source control is for :)

 I meant a VM and all its associated resources such as data volumes are backed up consistently. And if the application is a multi tier application that is spread across multiple vms, then all the vms should be backed up together consistently too. 
> 
>> 4.Point In Time(PiT) full and incremental backups and restores
> 
> Cool, very useful.
> 
>> 5.Dedupe at source for efficient backups
> 
> Hmmm... this would depend heavily on what is being backed up and the level of access that Raksha would have to the tenant's application domains. Unless you are going to limit yourself to just backing up and restoring instances or volumes? Is that the plan?

Yes, that is the plan. We don't have plans to look into vms and backup any individual resources with in a vm.
> 
>> 6.A job scheduler for periodic backups
> 
> Cron?
Yes, similar.
> 
>> 7.Noninvasive backup solution that does not require service interruption
>> during backup window
> 
> By "service", are you referring to the tenant's applications running on the instance? Or are you referring to something else?

A service similar to either nova or cinder. We don't want to run any agents inside tenant vms.
> 
> Also, one thing that is really good to expose/debate/discuss early on in the project's incubation is the RESTful API that the project would expose. I'd be really interested to see this.

Absolutely. We took a first stab of the list restful API that raksha need to support in our wiki @ http://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/raksha.
> 
> Finally, would be good to include in the wiki page some discussion about any interaction with Trove (DBaaS), especially since Trove's API already implements a backups/ resource [1].
> 
That is a good point.  we will include that in the wiki.

> Best,
> -jay
> 
> [1] https://github.com/openstack/database-api/blob/master/openstack-database-api/src/markdown/database-api-v1.md#backups
> 
>> You will find the rationale behind the need for Raksha in OpenStack in
>> its Wiki. The wiki also has the preliminary design and the API
>> description.Some of the Raksha functionality may overlap with Nova and
>> Cinder projects and as a community lets work together to coordinate the
>> features among these projects. We would like to seek out early feedback
>> so we can address as many issues as we can in the first code drop. We
>> are hoping to enlist the OpenStack community help in making Raksha a
>> part of OpenStack.
>> 
>> Raksha’s project resources:
>> 
>> Wiki: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Raksha
>> 
>> Launchpad: https://launchpad.net/raksha
>> 
>> Github: https://github.com/DPaaS-Raksha/Raksha (We will upload a
>> prototype code in few days)
>> 
>> If you want to talk to us, send an email to
>> openstack-dev at lists.launchpad.net with "[raksha]" in the subject or use
>> #openstack-raksha irc channel.
>> 
>> Best Regards,
>> 
>> Murali Balcha
>> 
>> 
>> 
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> 
> 
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