Concepts
Portworx Backup (PX-Backup) is a Kubernetes backup solution that allows you to back up and restore applications and their data across multiple clusters. Portworx Backup works with Portworx Central (a web-based UI, that centralizes into a single user interface, various features or products including Portworx Backup), allowing administrators or other users to manage backups and restores of multiple Kubernetes clusters from a single user interface. Under this principle of multi-tenancy, authorized users connect through authorization providers to create and manage backups for clusters and applications which they have permissions without needing to go through an administrator.
Portworx Backup maintains a repository of available application backups and restores them to any destination cluster that a user has access to. Portworx Backup communicates with backup locations on regular-basis to check for the availability of new backups.
Portworx Backup can leverage both, KDMP driver or cloud native drivers to take backups.
Portworx Backup architecture
Understand how Portworx Backup works
Portworx Backup is compatible with any Kubernetes cluster, including managed and cloud deployments, and does not require Portworx Enterprise to be installed. Portworx Backup integrates with the following major categories of storage providers:
- AWS S3
- S3 compatible object store
- Azure
- NFS
- EFS
- GCP Filestore
- Azure file share
Portworx Backup supports taking backup on the following backup targets:
| Block storage (Data being backed up from) | File storage (Data being backed up from) |
|---|---|
|
|
Portworx Backup can back up the following Kubernetes resources:
- ClusterRole
- ClusterRoleBinding
- ConfigMap
- Custom CRDs (via a CRD registration process)
- Custom resources
- DaemonSet
- Deployment
- Ingress
- Persistent Volume (PV)
- Persistent Volume Claim (PVC)
- Role
- RoleBinding
- Service
- Secret
- ServiceAccount
- StatefulSet
Portworx Backup provides namespace and label selectors, allowing you to create granular backups of the application you want. You can back up an entire namespace, or you can use label selectors to select only certain resources to back up. This selection method also helps preserve associated configuration and pod data, ensuring that your backups work properly once restored. For example, Portworx Backup can back up a MySQL deployment containing pods, PVCs, and volumes tagged with an app = mysql label. You can apply the labels for your namespaces, resources and their backups with a key-value pair using the CLI and with Portworx Backup user interface you can filter them when needed at a later point in time to create a backup. Given this system, Portworx Backup can back up stateful applications as easily as stateless ones. For more information on how labels work, refer to Labels in Portworx Backup.
You can schedule backups by creating an independent schedule policy that defines when backups must run and how many rolling copies they keep, and you can associate this schedule policy with as many backups as you want.
Portworx Backup helps you to eliminate manual preparation tasks and lets you minimize the interruptions to your cluster associated with backup tasks by creating backup rules that run before and after backups are taken. As with schedule policies, you can associate rules with multiple backups.
The following topics help you to learn more on Portworx Backup:
📄️ Components
Portworx Backup components
📄️ Stork
Stork (STorage Orchestrator Runtime for Kubernetes) is an intelligent storage orchestrator for Kubernetes and a cloud native storage operator runtime scheduler plugin. Stork is one of the major components of Portworx Backup and translates decisions of a scheduler orchestration system in such a way that an external cloud native storage solution can act upon. By doing so, Stork extends Kubernetes capabilities with the help of the underlying storage provider, making it more stateful aware.
📄️ Web console
You can interact with Portworx Backup through a central user interface called Portworx Backup web console. From here, you can: