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

Sam Yaple samuel at yaple.net
Wed Feb 3 16:14:44 UTC 2016


On Wed, Feb 3, 2016 at 3:58 PM, Duncan Thomas <duncan.thomas at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On 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.
>
> This is potentially possible. The issue I see would be around
compression/encryption of the different chunks (in ekko we refer to them as
segments). But we will probably be able to work this out in time.


> Thanks for keeping the dialog open, it has definitely been useful.
>
> I have enjoyed the exchange as well. I am a big fan of open-source and
community.

>
> --
> Duncan Thomas
>
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