Using Ark (pre v0.10) with Portworx

Heptio Ark is a utility for managing disaster recovery, specifically for your Kubernetes cluster resources and persistent volumes. To take snapshots of Portworx volumes through Ark you need to install and configure the Portworx plugin.

Install Ark Plugin

Run the following command to install the Portworx plugin for Ark:

ark plugin add portworx/ark-plugin:0.3

This should add an init container to your Ark deployment to install the plugin.

Configure Ark to use Portworx snapshots

Once the plugin is installed you need to configure Ark to use Portworx as the Persistent Volume Provider when taking snapshots. To edit the config run the following command:

kubectl edit config -n heptio-ark

And set up portworx as the persistentVolumeProvider by adding the following snippet to the config spec:

persistentVolumeProvider:
  name: portworx

Using local snapshots (default)

By default, local snapshots will be created for PVCs backed by Portworx. You can explicitly configure this by specifying local as the type in the config section:

persistentVolumeProvider:
  name: portworx
  config:
    type: local

Using cloud snapshots (Supported from Portworx Enterprise 1.4 onwards)

To use cloud snapshots to backup your PVCs, you need to specify cloud as the type in the config section. If you have more than one credential configured with Portworx you also need to specify the UUID of the credential using credId:

persistentVolumeProvider:
  name: portworx
  config:
    type: cloud
    # Optional, required only if Portworx is configured with more than one credential
    credId: <UUID>

Managing snapshots

Once the plugin has been installed and configured, everytime you take backups using Ark and include PVCs, it will also take Portworx snapshots of your volumes.

Creating backups

For example, to backup all your apps in the default namespace and also snapshot your volumes, you would run the following command:

ark backup create default-ns-backup --include-namespaces=default --snapshot-volumes

Backup request "default-ns-backup" submitted successfully.
Run `ark backup describe default-ns-backup` for more details.

Once the specs and volumes have been backed up you should see the backup marked as Completed in ark.

ark get backup

NAME                STATUS      CREATED                         EXPIRES   SELECTOR
default-ns-backup   Completed   2018-05-29 20:10:45 +0000 UTC   29d       <none>

Restoring from backups

When restoring from backups, a clone volume will be created from the snapshot and bound to the restored PVC. To restore from the backup created above you can run the following command:

ark restore create --from-backup default-ns-backup

Restore request "default-ns-backup-20180529201245" submitted successfully.
Run `ark restore describe default-ns-backup-20180529201245` for more details.