[openstack-dev] Announcing Ekko -- Scalable block-based backup for OpenStack

Sam Yaple samuel at yaple.net
Tue Feb 2 00:28:00 UTC 2016


On Mon, Feb 1, 2016 at 10:32 PM, Fausto Marzi <fausto.marzi at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi Preston,
> Thank you. You saw Fabrizio in Vancouver, I'm Fausto, but it's allright, :
> P
>
> The challenge is interesting. If we want to build a dedicated backup API
> service (which is always what we wanted to do), probably we need to:
>
>
>    - Place out of Nova and Cinder the backup features, as it wouldn't
>    make much sense to me to have a Backup service and also have backups
>    managed independently by Nova and Cinder.
>
>
> That said, I'm not a big fan of the following:
>
>    - Interacting with the hypervisors and the volumes directly without
>    passing through the Nova and Cinder API.
>
> Passing through the api will be a huge issue for extracting data due to
the sheer volume of data needed (TB through the api is going to kill
everything!)

>
>    - Adding any additional workload on the compute nodes or block storage
>    nodes.
>    - Computing incremental, compression, encryption is expensive. Have
>    many simultaneous process doing that may lead  to bad behaviours on core
>    services.
>
> These are valid concerns, but the alternative is still shipping the raw
data elsewhere to do this work, and that has its own issue in terms of
bandwidth.

>
> My (flexible) thoughts are:
>
>    - The feature is needed and is brilliant.
>    - We should probably implement the newest feature provided by the
>    hypervisor in Nova and export them from the Nova API.
>    - Create a plugin that is integrated with Freezer to leverage that new
>    features.
>    - Same apply for Cinder.
>    - The VMs and Volumes backup feature is already available by Nova,
>    Cinder and Freezer. It needs to be improved for sure a lot, but do we need
>    to create a new project for a feature that needs to be improved, rather
>    than work with the existing Teams?
>
> I disagree with this statement strongly as I have stated before. Nova has
snapshots. Cinder has snapshots (though they do say cinder-backup). Freezer
wraps Nova and Cinder. Snapshots are not backups. They are certainly not
_incremental_ backups. They can have neither compression, nor encryption.
With this in mind, Freezer does not have this "feature" at all. Its not
that it needs improvement, it simply does not exist in Freezer. So a
separate project dedicated to that one goal is not unreasonable. The real
question is whether it is practical to merge Freezer and Ekko, and this is
the question Ekko and the Freezer team are attempting to answer.

>
>    - No one wants to block others, Sam proposed solution is indeed
>    remarkable, but this is OpenStack, we work in Teams, why we cannot do that
>    and be less fragmented.
>
>
> Thanks,
> Fausto
>
>
Sam Yaple
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