Containers have become a great facility to easily deploy applications, whether locally or on orchestrated clusters. However, containers are ephemeral, meaning their data should be stored externally. When possible, they can be stored using databases or object storage. Most often though, you will need to resort to using data volumes, mounted inside your containers. How then can be perform a backup of this data?

1. Bivac
Container Volumes Backup

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Raphaël Pinson
● Infrastructure Developer
● Trainer
● DevOps Practitioner
● Puppet, Augeas, Terraform,
Kubernetes

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Good Practices
Containers should be stateless, either:
○ No persistent data
○ Database
○ Object storage

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Reality
Many containers need local storage
○ in Docker: Docker volume
○ in Kubernetes: PVC/PV
○ (in Rancher 1: Rancher volume)

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Backing up data
Two approaches
○ infrastructure:
■ disaster recovery
■ physical drives (snapshots, etc.)
○ applications:
■ app backup
■ per data location

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How to backup
■ Traditionally
○ location unknown
○ custom scripts
■ In containers
○ location known (named volume)
○ possible to automate

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Bivac
■ Open-source backup tool
for container volumes
■ Supports:
○ Docker (local volumes)
○ Kubernetes (PVC)
○ Rancher (Rancher Volumes)

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Install: locally
---
version: '3'
services:
bivac:
image: camptocamp/bivac:2.2
command: "manager -v"
ports:
- "8182:8182"
volumes:
- "/var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro"
environment:
BIVAC_AGENT_IMAGE: camptocamp/bivac:2.1
BIVAC_SERVER_PSK: super-secret-psk
RESTIC_PASSWORD: not-so-good-password
BIVAC_TARGET_URL: s3:my-bucket
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID: XXXXX
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY: XXXXX

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Install: Helm (k8s)
$ helm repo add camptocamp http://charts.camptocamp.com
$ helm install camptocamp/bivac --version 1.0.0

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Performing & listing backups
$ bivac backup ssh_config
Backing up `ssh_config'...
ID: ssh_config
Name: ssh_sshconfig
Mountpoint: /etc/ssh
Backup date: 2019-06-13 09:35:38
Backup status: Success
...
$ bivac volumes
ID Name Hostname Mountpoint LastBackupDate LastBackupStatus Backing up
mysql mysql testing /var/lib/mysql 2019-06-13 01:33:44 Success false
ssh_config ssh_config testing /etc/ssh 2019-06-13 01:43:12 Success false

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Restoring backups
$ bivac restore canary
Restoring `canary'...
ID: canary
Name: canary
Mountpoint: /var/lib/docker/volumes/canary/_data
Backup date: 2019-06-13 07:56:36
Backup status: Success
...

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Metrics
■ Bivac exposes backup metrics
■ Can be scraped by Prometheus:
---
scrape_configs:
- job_name: 'bivac'
static_configs:
- targets: ['bivac:8182']
■ Can be used in Grafana to generate graphs

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Metrics: alerting
■ Use Prometheus metrics
with AlertManager:
---
groups:
- name: example
rules:
- alert: BackupError
expr: bivac_backupExitCode{} > 0
- alert: BackupOutdated
expr: time() - bivac_lastBackup{} > 49 * 3600

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