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Creating Claudie Backup

In this section we'll explain where the state of Claudie is and backing up the necessary components and restoring them on a completely new cluster.

Claudie state

Claudie stores its state in 3 different places.

  • Input Manifests are stored in Mongo.
  • Terraform state files are stored in MinIO
  • Locking Mechanism for the state files is implemented via DynamoDB

These are the only services that will have a PVC attached to it, the other are stateless.

Backing up Claudie

All resources that are deployed or created by Claudie can be identified with the following label:

    app.kubernetes.io/part-of: claudie

If you want to include your deployed Input Manifests to be part of the backup you'll have to add the same label to them.

We'll walk through the following scenario step-by-step to back up claudie and then restore it.

Claudie is already deployed on an existing Management Cluster and at least 1 Input Manifest has been applied. The state is backed up and the Management Cluster is replaced by a new one on which we restore the state.

To back up the resources we'll be using Velero version v1.11.0

The following steps will all be executed with the existing Management Cluster in context.

  1. To create a backup, Velero needs to store the state to external storage. The list of supported providers for the external storage can be found in the link. In this guide we'll be using AWS S3 object storage for our backup.

  2. Prepare the S3 bucket by following the first two steps in this setup guide, excluding the installation step, as this will be different for our use-case.

If you do not have the aws CLI locally installed, follow the user guide to set it up.

  1. Execute the following command to install Velero on the Management Cluster. 
    velero install \
--provider aws \
--plugins velero/velero-plugin-for-aws:v1.6.0 \
--bucket $BUCKET \
--secret-file ./credentials-velero \
--backup-location-config region=$REGION \
--snapshot-location-config region=$REGION \
--use-node-agent \
--default-volumes-to-fs-backup

Following the instructions in step 2, you should have a credentials-velero file with the access and secret keys for the aws setup. The env variables $BUCKET and $REGION should be set to the name and region for the bucket created in AWS S3.

By default Velero will use your default config $HOME/.kube/config, if this is not the config that points to your Management Cluster, you can override it with the --kubeconfig argument.

  1. Backup claudie by executing 
    velero backup create claudie-backup --selector app.kubernetes.io/part-of=claudie

To track the progress of the backup execute 

velero backup describe claudie-backup --details

From this point the new Management Cluster for Claudie is in context. We expect that your default kubeconfig points to the new Management Cluster, if it does not, you can override it in the following commands using --kubeconfig ./path-to-config.

  1. Repeat the step to install Velero, but now on the new Management Cluster.
  2. Install cert manager to the new Management Cluster by executing: 
    kubectl apply -f https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/releases/download/v1.12.0/cert-manager.yaml
  3. To restore the state that was stored in the S3 bucket execute 
    velero restore create --from-backup claudie-backup

Once all resources are restored, you should be able to deploy new input manifests and also modify existing infrastructure without any problems.