Introducing ReShifter for Kubernetes: backup, restore, migration, upgrade

TL;DR: If you’re using Kubernetes beyond dev/test, that is, in production you need a strategy for restoring and upgrading clusters. ReShifter is a WIP aiming at supporting you with these operations.

A Kubernetes cluster admin has a lot of responsibility …

Are you using Kubernetes beyond development and testing, in a production setup? Would you like to be able to back up and restore your entire Kubernetes cluster (automatically) and restore it with a single action? What about upgrading to a new version of Kubernetes? Can you do this without downtimes?

If you found yourself nodding along and/or answering Yes to any of the above questions, do read on.

While in managed environments such as GKE or OpenShift Online you don’t have issues around restoring cluster state or upgrading to a new Kubernetes version, on-premises setups or deployments into the public cloud, where you’re operating the cluster yourself will present you with this challenge.

Having said this, meet ReShifter, the cluster admin backup and restore tool for Kubernetes and OpenShift. Note that ReShifter is early days, it’s at time of writing not more than an MVP with minimal functionality. Major parts such as installation, setting up in cluster, running scheduled backups and many more are still missing. However, I decided to share ReShifter with you now because I need and want your feedback: what functionality is the most important one to you? What is missing for a 1.0 release? Please leave a comment here, on GitHub, at the screen cast on Loom, or hit me up on Twitter.

What I have in the ReShifter MVP so far is:

• a simple, but more or less stable, HTTP API
• a bare-bone UI
• support for insecure and secure etcd v2, with support for v3 in the works
• can create a cluster backup, stored in local filesystem
• can restore a backup from local filesystem
• can download a backup

The whole thing looks like this in action:

Screen cast available via Loom.

OK, that’s it.

Thanks for your time and attention and hope to hear back from you!