Backup and restore — initial setup
This page covers backup tooling configured at install time. Day-2 backup verification and restore procedures belong in the Administration Guide.
Storage
Backup requirements It is important to take regular backups (what we will notate as snapshots) of your Consul cluster to maintain the registry of services. Consul Snapshot Agent runs within your environment as a service or scheduled to operate a highly available process that automatically takes snapshots, rotates backups, and sends the files to Amazon S3. We recommend provisioning an S3 bucket to use as part of this design. The snapshots are atomic and point-in-time, and include common items maintained by the Consul servers including (but not limited to):
- Key/Value Store Entries
- Service Catalog Registrations
- Prepared Queries
- Sessions
- Access Control Lists (ACLs)
- Namespaces
We recommend running the snapshot agent as a service (for example, with systemd) and utilize it as a long running process based on the RPO of your organization.
Storage
Storage requirements for the Consul server agents or client services will be managed by Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver that allows Amazon EKS clusters to manage the lifecycle of Amazon EBS volumes for persistent volumes.
EBS volume creation must be tagged with required resource tags(opens in new tab) with Data Lifecycle policies(opens in new tab) to prevent from deleting the EBS volumes and snapshots.
The Amazon EBS CSI driver isn't installed when you first create a cluster. To use the driver, you must add it as an Amazon EKS add-on.For instructions on how to add it as an Amazon EKS add-on, see Managing the Amazon EBS CSI driver as an Amazon EKS add-on(opens in new tab).