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

Duncan Thomas duncan.thomas at gmail.com
Wed Feb 3 15:58:47 UTC 2016


tOn 3 February 2016 at 17:52, Sam Yaple <samuel at yaple.net> wrote:


> This is a very similiar method to what Ekko is doing. The json mapping in
> Ekko is a manifest file which is a sqlite database. The major difference I
> see is Ekko is doing backup trees. If you launch 1000 instances from the
> same glance image, you don't need 1000 fulls, you need 1 full and 1000
> incrementals. Doing that means you save a ton of space, time, bandwidth,
> IO, but it also means n number of backups can reference the same chunk of
> data and it makes deletion of that data much harder than you describe in
> Cinder. When restoring a backup, you don't _need_ a new full, you need to
> start your backups based on the last restore point and the same point about
> saving applies. It also means that Ekko can provide "backups can scale with
> OpenStack" in that sense. Your backups will only ever be your changed data.
>
> I recognize that isn't probably a huge concern for Cinder, with volumes
> typically being just unique data and not duplicate data, but with nova I
> would argue _most_ instances in an OpenStack deployment will be based on
> the same small subset of images and thats alot of duplicate data to
> consider backing up especially at scale.
>
>

So this sounds great. If your backup formats are similar enough, it is
worth considering putting a backup export function in that spits out a
cinder-backup compatible JSON file (it's a dead simple format) and perhaps
an import for the same. That would allow cinder backup and Ekko to exchange
data where desired. I'm not sure if this is possible, but I'd certainly
suggest looking at it.

Thanks for keeping the dialog open, it has definitely been useful.


-- 
Duncan Thomas
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