Open Stack

Likely as the first part of the problem is as yet unsolved. How do you do
backup in OpenStack, efficiently?

Schedules are easy. Simple "cron" works. The vendor offering backup could
do scheduling. The public cloud providers might want to do their own
scheduling. Individual cloud tenants might want to do their own scheduling.
Individual cloud application developers might want to do their own
scheduling. Different use-cases.

Note that vendor-offered scheduling might not align with provider, tenant,
or developer needs for scheduling. So you have to cover the on-demand case
first, and well. Of course, as a backup vendor you want to offer
scheduling, as it is expected. You might cover most of the use-cases, but
not all.

As an cloud application developer using AWS, there is existing basic
function to do simple on-demand backups that works rather well. OpenStack
does not have the equivalent. So as a developer deploying applications to
the cloud, AWS is better. With AWS you can cover the scheduling cases, with
a bit of easy work.

As a cloud provider, your first problem is that the existing offerings from
backup vendors are not very good (as you may have noticed).

As a backup vendor, you can offer solutions using in-guest agents.
(Essentially treating each instance as you would a stand-alone machine.)
Most folk want efficient backup across all instances, with minimal
footprint (or none) in the instance. Image-based backup is most efficient,
but the current set of primitives offered by OpenStack are not sufficient.
There is certainly work in progress, trying to add needed primitives, but
the word "done" as yet does not apply.

As a backup vendor, you can offer inefficient backup using existing
OpenStack primitives. You can offer efficient backup specific to a very
limited number of configurations (hypervisor and block storage
implementations). This is not what most folk want.


So this is where we are, and why you are not finding what you need.






On Tue, Dec 23, 2014 at 10:20 AM, Tim Bell <Tim.Bell at cern.ch> wrote:

>
>
> There is a need for an end user service for backup/snapshot on a schedule.
> Raksha (https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Raksha) was close but does not
> seem to be actively developed at the moment. Extensions for remote
> replication on schedule would be really welcome.
>
>
>
> It is not clear to me how the standard user arranges a reasonable backup
> strategy for their VM currently on OpenStack ?
>
>
>
> While there are some applications which can be re-created from scratch
> faster than from backup, the typical CERN test/dev instance is where people
> try out ideas before setting things up in Puppet or with external volumes.
> Explaining that the VM is lost is not an easy discussion.
>
>
>
> It can all be scripted… can we arrange that this this requires a
> relatively limited effort to script ? Passwords, expiration of old images
> and replication are not trivial problems to solve for the average end user.
>
>
>
> Tim
>
>
>
> *From:* Yaguang Tang [mailto:heut2008 at gmail.com]
> *Sent:* 23 December 2014 10:35
> *To:* Erik McCormick
> *Cc:* openstack at lists.openstack.org
> *Subject:* Re: [Openstack] Openstack capabilities
>
>    …
>
> 14.Supports backup manager
>
>
> The snapshot operation and daily/weekly/hourly backup operations are
> currently supported via OpenStack Nova's API. However, if you're looking
> for some Windows GUI that does backups, that isn't something that OpenStack
> is about to provide.
>
>
>
>       Yeah we do have API support for instance backup periodically , but
> AFAIK this feature doesn't work at all, there isn't a periodic worker doing
> that, and
>
>        instance periodic backup info isn't stored anywhere, I have written
> a patch to implement that for a customer before, if this is a common
> feature request,  I'd like to discuss in the openstack-dev ML and
> contribute it to upstream.
>
>
>
>
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