Create an Azure Red Hat OpenShift 4 cluster Application Backup

Article
09/01/2022

In this article, you'll prepare your environment to create an Azure Red Hat OpenShift 4 cluster application backup. You'll learn how to:

Setup the prerequisites and install the necessary tools
Create an Azure Red Hat OpenShift 4 application backup

If you choose to install and use the CLI locally, this tutorial requires that you're running the Azure CLI version 2.6.0 or later. Run az --version to find the version. If you need to install or upgrade, see Install Azure CLI.

Before you begin

Install Velero

To install Velero on your system, follow the recommended process for your operating system.

Set up Azure storage account and Blob container

This step will create a resource group outside of the ARO cluster's resource group. This resource group will allow the backups to persist and can restore applications to new clusters.

AZURE_BACKUP_RESOURCE_GROUP=Velero_Backups
az group create -n $AZURE_BACKUP_RESOURCE_GROUP --location eastus

AZURE_STORAGE_ACCOUNT_ID="velero$(uuidgen | cut -d '-' -f5 | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]')"
az storage account create \
    --name $AZURE_STORAGE_ACCOUNT_ID \
    --resource-group $AZURE_BACKUP_RESOURCE_GROUP \
    --sku Standard_GRS \
    --encryption-services blob \
    --https-only true \
    --kind BlobStorage \
    --access-tier Hot

BLOB_CONTAINER=velero
az storage container create -n $BLOB_CONTAINER --public-access off --account-name $AZURE_STORAGE_ACCOUNT_ID

Set permissions for Velero

Create service principal

Velero needs permissions to do backups and restores. When you create a service principal, you're giving Velero permission to access the resource group you define in the previous step. This step will get the cluster's resource group:

export AZURE_RESOURCE_GROUP=$(az aro show --name <name of cluster> --resource-group <name of resource group> | jq -r .clusterProfile.resourceGroupId | cut -d '/' -f 5,5)

AZURE_SUBSCRIPTION_ID=$(az account list --query '[?isDefault].id' -o tsv)

AZURE_TENANT_ID=$(az account list --query '[?isDefault].tenantId' -o tsv)

AZURE_CLIENT_SECRET=$(az ad sp create-for-rbac --name "velero" --role "Contributor" --query 'password' -o tsv \
--scopes  /subscriptions/$AZURE_SUBSCRIPTION_ID)
AZURE_CLIENT_ID=$(az ad sp list --display-name "velero" --query '[0].appId' -o tsv)

cat << EOF  > ./credentials-velero.yaml
AZURE_SUBSCRIPTION_ID=${AZURE_SUBSCRIPTION_ID}
AZURE_TENANT_ID=${AZURE_TENANT_ID}
AZURE_CLIENT_ID=${AZURE_CLIENT_ID}
AZURE_CLIENT_SECRET=${AZURE_CLIENT_SECRET}
AZURE_RESOURCE_GROUP=${AZURE_RESOURCE_GROUP}
AZURE_CLOUD_NAME=AzurePublicCloud
EOF

Install Velero on Azure Red Hat OpenShift 4 cluster

This step will install Velero into its own project and the custom resource definitions necessary to do backups and restores with Velero. Make sure you're successfully logged in to an Azure Red Hat OpenShift v4 cluster.

velero install \
--provider azure \
--plugins velero/velero-plugin-for-microsoft-azure:v1.1.0 \
--bucket $BLOB_CONTAINER \
--secret-file ~/path/to/credentials-velero.yaml \
--backup-location-config resourceGroup=$AZURE_BACKUP_RESOURCE_GROUP,storageAccount=$AZURE_STORAGE_ACCOUNT_ID \
--snapshot-location-config apiTimeout=15m \
--velero-pod-cpu-limit="0" --velero-pod-mem-limit="0" \
--velero-pod-mem-request="0" --velero-pod-cpu-request="0"

Create a backup with Velero

To create an application backup with Velero, you'll need to include the namespace that this application is in. If you have a nginx-example namespace and want to include all the resources in that namespace in the backup, run the following command in the terminal:

velero create backup <name of backup> --include-namespaces=nginx-example

You can check the status of the backup by running:

oc get backups -n velero <name of backup> -o yaml

A successful backup will output phase:Completed and the objects will live in the container in the storage account.

Create a backup with Velero to include snapshots

To create an application backup with Velero to include the persistent volumes of your application, you'll need to include the namespace that the application is in and include the snapshot-volumes=true flag when creating the backup.

velero backup create <name of backup> --include-namespaces=nginx-example --snapshot-volumes=true --include-cluster-resources=true

You can check the status of the backup by running:

oc get backups -n velero <name of backup> -o yaml

A successful backup with output phase:Completed and the objects will live in the container in the storage account.

For more information, see Backup OpenShift resources the native way

Next steps

In this article, an Azure Red Hat OpenShift 4 cluster application was backed up. You learned how to:

Create a OpenShift v4 cluster application backup using Velero
Create a OpenShift v4 cluster application backup with snapshots using Velero

Advance to the next article to learn how to create an Azure Red Hat OpenShift 4 cluster application restore.

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