Recently I wrote a blog post on how to execute scheduled backups using
KubernetesCronJobs. In that post I showed how easily one
could dump backup files to an S3 bucket on a schedule using some trivially
simple containers, but the astute among you will have noticed that I didn’t
touch on the topic of backup rotation…
Backup rotation is the process of removing old or extraneous backups to make
the best of your available storage space and in this post I’ll go over the
approach I use to keep track of the backups that are important to us.
It’s a poorly hidden fact that I love Kubernetes. After spending months running everything from
Marathon DCOS and CoreOS to Rancher and Docker Swarm in production, Kubernetes is the only
container orchestration platform that has truly struck me as truly “production ready” and I
have been running it for the past year as a result.
While functionality when I first started using it (v1.4) was somewhat patchy and uninteresting,
some of the more recent updates have been making sizeable strides towards addressing the operations
challenges we face on a daily basis.
With v1.8, Kubernetes has introduced the CronJob controller to batch/v1beta1, making it
generally available for people to play with. Sounds like the perfect time to show you how we
use CronJobs to manage automated, scheduled, backups within our environments.
Sierra Softworks