Motivation for this article

You're only as good as your last backup. But only way to ensure you even have a last backup, is with backup testing

Why testing backups is so important: effectiveness of backups are reduced drastically when you do not test them regularly and routinely

Backup and recovery testing is the process of assessing the effectiveness of the systems, procedures, and methods that a company uses to replicate, store, and retrieve data in times of need, that’s when you really don’t want to find out backups were incomplete, broken or even missing

This article is focused on Microsoft Azure but Evaluating Cloud Backup Solutions: AWS vs. Azure vs. Google Cloud is a good read if you haven’t decided yet which Cloud provider to use, as having comprehensive backup solutions should be a decisive point when choosing your provider

What will I learn reading this article?

I’ll teach you how to test VMs backed up on Azure with less hassle than doing everything manually. We will test a simple Go API with a MySQL DB running on 2 separate VMs, we will restore them and issue a series of tests against them

To do this, we won’t be clicking around the Azure Portal or firing up our PowerShell console. Nothing against those labor-intensive ways, many use them and are happy, but we have something better called Wenenu

Wenenu will take care of restoring our 2 VMs on a private network without public connectivity, deploy himself to same network to carry out our tests and report back.

Stay tuned for more to come on this series and also upcoming articles on Disaster Recovery Testing so please subscribe now to our HackerNoon profile

What’s Wenenu?

Head straight to https://wenenu.com/app/ if you are itching to try it out, keep reading if you prefer to follow the tutorial first or book a demo if you prefer to see it demoed by us, there’s also a recording of our latest webinar, which is a good companion to this article but which you don’t really need to watch to make the most out of this tutorial

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56aaXUc6xtQ

Wenenu let you orchestrate backup restores in isolated environments that can be put to a multitude of easily written tests, you don’t need to know coding to check for working services but if you prefer, you can write as much code as you need for when the standard modules won’t cut it.

Not only this, you get reports and scheduling out of the box. Write once, schedule and rest assured your environments would work as expected whenever you need to restore them

Let’s write some tests

Setting up Users and API access on Wenenu

In our tutorial, we’ll begin by ensuring we have set the rights permissions on Azure for Wenenu to interact with our backups

Wenenu it’s free for 2 months by using their trial and you don’t need to provide any card details at all. Sign up on https://wenenu.com/app/

You will be asked to Authorise the Wenenu Application, you can take a look at your user on Azure’s Active Directory to see Wenenu just added

Next step is to create the right account for the Wenenu Test Agent to be able restore your VMs

You need to create an Azure Service Principal and add it on Wenenu. This will allow Wenenu to interact with the Azure ARM API to be able to create Virtual Machines from the restore points

You probably know how to so I’ll summarise the steps in a concise way

1. Create an App Registration on your Azure Directory
2. Add the necessary roles to it on your Azure Subscription
3. And import the App Registration details into Azure

For this demo, I was using a free Azure Subscription with free credits. It’s a good way to start with Azure if you haven’t yet.

So we create our App, which will generate the API credentials we’ll have to paste on Wenenu

But our newly created App won’t be able to interact with our backups or restore any VM if not granted the right roles

Finally, with the credentials we got 2 steps ago, we are ready to add a Service Connector on Wenenu like the below

Creating our first scenario

A scenario is a collection of test steps, in which you can restore Backups or even Disaster Recovery environments but will look into that in further articles

We’ll create a scenario in which we’ll restore our 2 VMs and add 3 simple tests to verify our restored stack would work as we expect

Since our setup is so easy, I’ll just test the API and the MySQL DB with simple tests and also a custom block of code to showcase the capabilities of Wenenu.

Ready-made HTTP/s Tests

Ready-made DB Tests

The next type of test we’ll use which doesn’t require knowing any coding is a Database test, you can check connectivity but you can also run SQL. The output will be recorded on the final output of the scenario

Custom Code Tests

For cases when you need to write you own code, you’ll find there is support for different languages of many languages. We’ll use python this time

Make sure you hit Save.

Finally, we are ready to run and get results from our scenarios, head https://wenenu.com/app/scenarios and click on Run. You’ll be able to see how previous runs have fared if there were any

Now, Azure takes its time to restore backups, while you wait for the tests to run and if you are curious, you can take a look at your Azure Portal and see how VMs are restored alongside a Wenenu Agent, which will be the one carrying out the heavy lifting of testing

After some minutes, we get the results of the scenario run like the image below, you can also export the nice looking PDF report for every run

Where to go from here?

Subscribe to our HackerNoon channel for upcoming articles, Book a Demo now or simply try it out for free. Leave us a comment and many thanks for reading

Disclaimer

The author is a co-founder of Wenenu