Introduction
- Formerly known as “Heptio Ark”
- It provides tools to Backup and Restore K8s cluster
- It consists of the following components:
- Server: Runs on K8s cluster
- CLI: Runs locally
- Current release: v1.5.x
- GitHub stars: 4.6K+
Checkout here for more details
Architecture
Source: https://velero.io/docs/v1.5/img/backup-process.png
Velero supports the following operations:
- On-demand backup
- Scheduled backup
- Restore
Each operation is a custom resource defined with the custom resource definition and stored in etcd. Velero has controllers that act on these resources.
On-demand backup
Creates a copy of k8s objects in the form of tarball and uploads that tarball to cloud object storage
Note: Backup operation is not atomic.
Scheduled backup
As the name suggests you can schedule the backup at a particular time. You can also schedule recurrent backups. Provide Cron expression to specify a schedule. For e.g. Use the 0 0 * * * Cron expression to take backup once a day.
Restore
Creates k8s objects from the definition stored in cloud object storage.
Note: As a good practice always set the mode of backup storage location to Read-Only during restore to avoid update or deletion of backup.
Velero uses cloud object storage as a source of truth. It synchronizes data between cloud object storage and the K8s cluster.
Features
- Filtering k8s objects based on type, namespace & label during backup and restore
- TTL (Time to Live) for backups. Backup resources will be deleted after TTL is reached
- Different lifecycle hooks for both backup and restore operations
- Supports namespace remapping i.e. K8s object from namespace
Acan be restored to namespaceB