Backups on Support Tools

Using MinIO as a Backup Target for Rancher Longhorn

Sat, 26 Oct 2024 11:45:00 -0500

Longhorn, an open-source container-native storage system developed by Rancher, simplifies persistent volume backups by supporting S3 and NFS storage systems as backup targets. In this guide, we’ll walk through how to configure MinIO as an S3-compatible backup target for Longhorn, enabling reliable volume backups.

This post assumes that Longhorn and MinIO are already installed—for installation guides, refer to the official Longhorn documentation and MinIO Quickstart Guide.

Environment Overview

MinIO version: RELEASE.2021-08-17T20-53-08Z (deployed with Podman on SUSE SLES 15 SP2)
Longhorn version: 1.1.1 (installed via Rancher’s Application Catalog on an RKE cluster running Kubernetes 1.20.9-rancher1-1)

Step 1: Configure MinIO for Longhorn Backups

First, we’ll set up MinIO storage by creating a dedicated bucket, folder, user, and policy for Longhorn backups. Use MinIO’s command-line tool, mc, to manage these objects.

The Ultimate Guide to Kubernetes Backups for Rancher and RKE2

Tue, 22 Oct 2024 19:45:00 -0500

“No One Has Ever Gotten Fired for Having Too Many Backups”

When running Rancher or RKE2, there’s one mantra to live by: “Always back it up before making a change.” Backups are not just about recovering from disasters—they’re about giving you the confidence to experiment, upgrade, and troubleshoot without fear. This post covers essential strategies for Kubernetes backups, with practical advice and links to tools and methods to make backup processes effortless.

KubeBackup: Automating Kubernetes Cluster Backups

Sat, 19 Oct 2024 19:26:00 -0500

Backing up your Kubernetes cluster is critical for disaster recovery and operational continuity. KubeBackup is a tool designed to simplify cluster backups by exporting YAML configurations and uploading them to an S3 bucket. With KubeBackup, you can automate backups, ensuring you have all necessary data to redeploy or restore your cluster quickly.

Exploring Backup Tools for Kubernetes: Velero, Longhorn, and More

Fri, 18 Oct 2024 19:30:00 -0500

Backing up your Kubernetes cluster is critical for disaster recovery and ensuring continuity. Besides KubeBackup, other tools offer complementary and robust solutions for backing up both cluster configurations and data. In this post, we’ll explore Velero, Longhorn, and other tools that are designed to handle backups in Kubernetes environments.

Longhorn Backups: Protecting Persistent Data in Kubernetes

Wed, 16 Oct 2024 19:50:00 -0500

Longhorn provides a lightweight, reliable, and distributed block storage solution for Kubernetes, offering seamless backups of your persistent volumes (PVs) and ensuring your data is protected from failure.

In this post, we’ll dive into how Longhorn backups work, best practices for using them, and how to automate your backup process to protect your critical data.

Why Longhorn for Backups?

Longhorn is designed specifically for stateful workloads in Kubernetes. With native support for snapshots and backups, it ensures that data stored in Persistent Volume Claims (PVCs) is protected.

Kasten K10: Enterprise-Grade Backups for Kubernetes

Tue, 15 Oct 2024 19:55:00 -0500

Kubernetes environments require robust backups and disaster recovery tools to protect against failures, misconfigurations, and outages. Kasten K10 provides an enterprise-grade solution for backing up, restoring, and migrating Kubernetes applications, ensuring that both stateful and stateless workloads are safeguarded.

In this post, we’ll explore the features, installation process, and best practices for Kasten K10, making it easy for you to adopt it as part of your Kubernetes backup strategy.

Rancher Backups and Disaster Recovery for RKE1

Sun, 30 Jun 2024 23:18:00 -0500

Eventually, something will happen that requires restoring a Kubernetes cluster. That’s not a question of if but when.

In the case of Kubernetes, this means regularly backing up the etcd datastore.

How regular? The choice is yours. It is up to you how much data you are willing to lose.

For example, a highly active cluster may take snapshots every fifteen minutes or even every five minutes. In the case of a cluster that does not receive a lot of activity, a snapshot of the cluster might be taken daily.

You can never be fired for having too many backups.

As a default, RKE takes a snapshot every six hours and keeps it for one day, but you can change the settings in the cluster.yaml.

Any time you wish, you can run a snapshot by executing the command rke etcd snapshot-save and passing it the name of the backup and the location of cluster.yml. This command will write a snapshot of all the etcd hosts to /opt/rke/etcd-snapshots. It is possible to mount an NFS volume there, or you can configure RKE to copy the snapshot to S3 to restore it.