rightscale_backup cookbook

This cookbook provides a rightscale_backup resource that can create, restore, and clean up block device storage ("volume") backups on numerous public and private IaaS clouds.

A backup represents a collection of volume snapshots taken at the same time from one or more volumes attached to the server. A backup belongs to a series of backups, called the "lineage". Maintaining a lineage allows for point-in-time data recovery using timestamps (even if the snapshots are taken from different volumes). It also supports a more sophisticated algorithm for backup rotation/retention, as opposed to simple snapshot truncation.

The rightscale_backup resource uses RightScale's instance-facing API to manage backups in the cloud.

Github Repository: https://github.com/rightscale-cookbooks/rightscale_backup

Requirements

The system being configured must be a RightScale managed VM to have the required access to the RightScale API.
Chef 11 or higher.
Requires a RightScale account that is registered with all the cloud vendors you expect to provision on (e.g. AWS, Rackspace, Openstack, CloudStack, GCE, and Azure).
Cookbook dependencies
- rightscale_volume

Usage

This resource only handles manipulating volume backups. Managing volumes is handled by the rightscale_volume resource.

Example 1: Creates and attaches 2 volumes using the rightscale_volume resource, and then takes a backup of the volumes using the rightscale_backup resource.

# Creates and attaches two 1 GB volumes
2.times do |count|
  rightscale_volume "db_data_volume_#{count}" do
    size 1
    action [:create, :attach]
  end
end

# Backs up the two volumes to a 'db_backup_lineage' lineage
rightscale_backup "db_data_volume_backup" do
  lineage 'db_backup_lineage'
  action :create
end

Example 2: Restores the backup (created in Example 1) to the server

# Restores the latest backup in the 'db_backup_lineage' taken on or before
# the UNIX timestamp '1391118125'
rightscale_backup "db_data_volume_backup" do
  lineage 'db_backup_lineage'
  timestamp 1391118125
  action :restore
end

Example 3: Deletes old backups

# Deletes old backups from the 'db_backup_lineage' lineage. After this action
# there will be only 2 backups in the cloud.
rightscale_backup "db_data_volume_backup" do
  lineage 'db_backup_lineage'
  keep_last 2
  monthlies 1
  yearlies 1
  dailies 1
  weeklies 1
  action :cleanup
end

Recipes

default

The default recipe installs the right_api_client gem to make instance-facing RightScale API calls.

Resource/Providers

rightscale_backup

A resource to create, restore, and cleanup backups in the cloud.

Actions

Actions	Description	Default
`:create`	Creates a snapshot for every volume attached to the server	yes
`:restore`	Restores a backup from the cloud
`:cleanup`	Deletes old backups from the cloud

Attributes

Name	Description	Default	Required
`nickname`	Name of the backup. During `:create` action, all snapshots in the backup will be created with this name.		Yes
`lineage`	Lineage in which the backup must belong		Yes
`description`	Description for the backup. During `:restore` action, the volumes created from the snapshots are set with this description. If description is not given, the description in the snapshots will be used for the newly created volumes.		No
`from_master`	Set this to 'true' to create a `rs_backup:from_master=true` tag on the snapshots which can be used in filtering	`false`	No
`timestamp`	The timestamp on the backup. The latest perfect backup on or before this timestamp in the specified lineage will be picked for restore. This attribute can be set using the Time class or the seconds since UNIX epoch (Integer)		No
`size`	Size of the volume to be restored. All volumes created from the snapshot will be of this size. NOTE: This size must be equal to or larger than the size of the snapshots in the backup. WARNING: Some clouds do not support volume resizing and throws an exception when we pass this parameter. On clouds that supports resizing (currently only tested in EC2), the volumes will be created with this size instead of the original backup's size.		No
`timeout`	Throws an error if an action could not be completed within this timeout (in minutes)	`15`	No
`options`	Optional parameters hash. For example, `:volume_type` on Rackspace Open Clouds can be specified to restore the volume as an 'SATA' or 'SSD' device.		No
`keep_last`	Number of backups to keep from deleting	`60`	Yes
`dailies`	Number of daily backups to keep	`1`	No
`monthlies`	Number of monthly backups to keep	`12`	No
`weeklies`	Number of weekly backups to keep	`4`	No
`yearlies`	Number of yearly backups to keep	`2`	No

`:create` Action

Creates a snapshot for every volume attached to the server. The newly created snapshot will be tagged with the following

rs_backup:lineage=<string> - Lineage name of the backup
rs_backup:backup_id=<UUID> - Unique identifier for a backup (all snapshots in a backup will share this ID)
rs_backup:committed=true - The backup is committed
rs_backup:count=X - Number of snapshots in the backup
rs_backup:device=<device> - Device to which the volume was attached
rs_backup:position=Y - Position of the snapshot in a backup
rs_backup:timestamp=<timestamp> - Time at which the backup was taken A backup is considered a perfect backup when it is completed (all the snapshots are completed), committed (all the snapshots are committed), and the number of snapshots it found is equal to the number in the "rs_backup:count=" tag on each of the snapshots.

`:restore` Action

Restores a backup from the cloud. This will

create a volume for each snapshot in the backup
attach all the created volumes to the server at the device specified in the snapshot (obtained from rs_backup:device=). NOTE: If the devices are already being used on the server, the restore will fail.

`:cleanup` Action

Deletes old backups from the cloud. For all the perfect backups, the constraints of keep_last, dailies, weeklies, monthlies, and yearlies attributes will be applied (See 'Parameters' section below). The algorithm for choosing the backups to keep is enforced by the RightScale API which is the union of those set of backups if each of those conditions are applied independently.

backups_to_keep = backups_to_keep(keep_last) U backups_to_keep(dailies) U
backups_to_keep(weeklies) U backups_to_keep(monthlies) U backups_to_keep(yearlies)

An imperfect backup is picked up for clean up only if there exists a perfect backup with a newer timestamp. No constraints will be applied on imperfect backups and all of them will be cleaned up.

Author

Author:: RightScale, Inc. (cookbooks@rightscale.com)

nathan-rightscale/rightscale_backup