Generic Storage Backup and Restore

Applications can often be deployed using non-shared storage (e.g., local SSDs) or on systems where K10 does not currently support the underlying storage provider. To protect data in these scenarios, K10 with Kanister gives you the ability, with extremely minor application modifications to add functionality to backup, restore, and migrate this application data in an efficient and transparent manner.

While a complete example is provided below, the only changes needed are the addition of a sidecar to your application deployment that can mount the application data volume and an annotation that requests generic backup.

Using Sidecars

The sidecar can be added either by leveraging K10's sidecar injection feature or by manually patching the resource as described below.

Enable Kanister Sidecar Injection

K10 implements a Mutating Webhook Server which mutates workload objects by injecting a Kanister sidecar into the workload when the workload is created. By default, the sidecar injection feature is disabled. To enable this feature, the following options need to be used when installing K10 via the Helm chart:

--set injectKanisterSidecar.enabled=true

Once enabled, Kanister sidecar injection will be enabled for all workloads in all namespaces. To perform sidecar injections on workloads only in specific namespaces, the namespaceSelector labels can be set using the following option:

--set-string injectKanisterSidecar.namespaceSelector.matchLabels.key=value

By setting namespaceSelector labels, the Kanister sidecar will be injected only in the workloads which will be created in the namespace matching labels with namespaceSelector labels.

Similarly, to inject the sidecar for only specific workloads, the objectSelector option can be set as shown below:

--set-string injectKanisterSidecar.objectSelector.matchLabels.key=value

For example, to inject sidecars into workloads that match the label component: db and are in namespaces that are labeled with k10/injectKanisterSidecar: true, the following options should be added to the K10 Helm install command:

--set injectKanisterSidecar.enabled=true \
--set-string injectKanisterSidecar.objectSelector.matchLabels.component=db \
--set-string injectKanisterSidecar.namespaceSelector.matchLabels.k10/injectKanisterSidecar=true

The labels set with namespaceSelector and objectSelector are mutually inclusive. This means that if both the options are set to perform sidecar injection, the workloads should have labels matching the objectSelector labels AND they have to be created in the namespace with labels that match the namespaceSelector labels. Similarly, if multiple labels are specified for either namespaceSelector or objectSelector, they will all needed to match for a sidecar injection to occur.

Update the resource manifest

Alternatively, the Kanister sidecar can be added by updating the resource manifest with the Kanister sidecar. An example, where /data is used as an sample mount path, can be seen in the below specification. Note that the sidecar must be named kanister-sidecar and the side image version should be pinned to the latest Kanister release.

     - name: kanister-sidecar
       image: kanisterio/kanister-tools:0.30.0
       command: ["bash", "-c"]
       args:
       - "tail -f /dev/null"
       volumeMounts:
       - name: data
         mountPath: /data

Once the above change is made, K10 will be able to automatically extract data and, using its data engine, efficiently deduplicate data and transfer it into an object store.

If you have multiple volumes used by your pod, you simply need to mount them all within this sidecar container. There is no naming requirement on the mount path as long as they are unique.

Generic Backup Annotation

Generic backups can be requested by adding the k10.kasten.io/forcegenericbackup annotation to the workload as shown in the example below.

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: demo-app
  labels:
    app: demo
annotations:
  k10.kasten.io/forcegenericbackup: "true"

The following is a kubectl example to add the annotation to a running deployment:

# Add annotation to force generic backups
$ kubectl annotate deployment <deployment-name> k10.kasten.io/forcegenericbackup="true" --namespace=<namespace-name>

Even when snapshot support from the storage provider is available, generic backups can be enforced by adding the k10.kasten.io/forcegenericbackup annotation to the workload as described above.

Finally, note that the Kanister sidecar and Location profile must both be present for generic backups to work.

End-to-End Example

The below section provides a complete end-to-end example of how to extend your application to support generic backup and restore. A dummy application is used below but it should be straightforward to extend this example.

Prerequisites

  • Make sure you have installed K10 with injectKanisterSidecar enabled.

  • (Optional) namespaceSelector labels are set for injectKanisterSidecar.

injectKanisterSidecar can be enabled by passing the following flags while installing K10 helm chart

...
          --set injectKanisterSidecar.enabled=true \
          --set-string injectKanisterSidecar.namespaceSelector.matchLabels.k10/injectKanisterSidecar=true # Optional

Deploy the application

The following specification contains a complete example of how to exercise generic backup and restore functionality. It consists of a an application Deployment that use a Persistent Volume Claim (mounted internally at /data) for storing data.

Saving the below specification as a file, deployment.yaml, is recommended for reuse later.

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
  name: demo-pvc
  labels:
    app: demo
    pvc: demo
spec:
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteOnce
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 1Gi
---
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: demo-app
  labels:
    app: demo
  annotations:
    k10.kasten.io/forcegenericbackup: "true"
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: demo
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: demo
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: demo-container
        image: alpine:3.7
        resources:
            requests:
              memory: 256Mi
              cpu: 100m
        command: ["tail"]
        args: ["-f", "/dev/null"]
        volumeMounts:
        - name: data
          mountPath: /data
      volumes:
      - name: data
        persistentVolumeClaim:
          claimName: demo-pvc
  • Create a namespace:

    $ kubectl create namespace <namespace>
    

    If injectKanisterSidecar.namespaceSelector labels are set while installing K10, add the labels to namespace to match with namespaceSelector

    $ kubectl label namespace <namespace> k10/injectKanisterSidecar=true
    
  • Deploy the above application as follows:

    # Deploying in a specific namespace
    $ kubectl apply --namespace=<namespace> -f deployment.yaml
    
  • Check status of deployed application:

    List pods in the namespace. The demo-app pods can be seen created with two containers.

    # List pods
    $ kubectl get pods --namespace=<namespace> | grep demo-app
    # demo-app-56667f58dc-pbqqb   2/2     Running   0          24s
    
  • Describe the pod and verify the kanister-sidecar container is injected with the same volumeMounts.

    volumeMounts:
    - name: data
      mountPath: /data
    

Create a Location Profile

If you haven't done so already, create a Location profile with the appropriate Location and Credentials information from the K10 settings page. Instructions for creating location profiles can be found here

Insert Data

The easiest way to insert data into the demo application is to simply copy it in:

# Get pods for the demo application from its namespace
$ kubectl get pods --namespace=<namespace> | grep demo-app

# Copy required data manually into the pod
$ kubectl cp <file-name> <namespace>/<pod>:/data/

# Verify if the data was copied successfully
$ kubectl exec --namespace=<namespace> <pod> -- ls -l /data

Backup Data

Backup the application data either by creating a Policy or running a Manual Backup from K10. This assumes that the application is running on a system where K10 does not support the provisioned disks (e.g., local storage). Make sure to specify the location profile in the advanced settings for the policy. This is required to perform Kanister operations.

Destroy Data

To destroy the data manually, run the following command:

# Using kubectl
$ kubectl exec --namespace=<namespace> <pod> -- rm -rf /data/<file-name>

Alternatively, the application and the PVC can be deleted and recreated.

Restore Data

Restore the data using K10 by selecting the appropriate restore point.

Verify Data

After restore, you should verify that the data is intact. One way to verify this is to use MD5 checksum tool.

# MD5 on the original file copied
$ md5 <file-name>

# Copy the restored data back to local env
$ kubectl get pods --namespace=<namespace> | grep demo-app
$ kubectl cp <namespace>/<pod>:/data/<filename> <new-filename>

# MD5 on the new file
$ md5 <new-filename>

The MD5 checksums should match.