Creating Backups with a9s Search on Azure

Creating backups on Azure with OpenSearch requires a different approach, and as such, the specification of parameters is different from the usual proceedings.

Some settings are still configured on the backup-service, whereas the credentials for the Azure account itself must be specified in the deployment manifest of the service instance because the credentials have to be present on all cluster nodes.

Prerequisites

You need access to Azure. There are three parameters you need for that (in terms of the az CLI):

• account-name
• account-key
• container-name

Configuring the Backup Service

The settings required to configure the backup-service are provider, container, azure_storage_account_name and azure_storage_access_key:

plugin_configuration:
  opensearch-backup:
    provider: AzureRM
    container: ((/azure_container))
    azure_storage_account_name: ((/azure_storage_account_name))
    azure_storage_access_key: ((/azure_storage_access_key))
    name:
      backup: opensearch-backup
      restore: opensearch-restore

Configuring Service Instances

Azure's credentials are specified in the deployment manifest.

a9s Search 2

Properties of an a9s Search instance:

opensearch:
  keystore:
    'azure.client.default.account': 'your-account-name'
    'azure.client.default.key': 'your-account-key'

Verify Your Setup

To check whether the backup works or not, you can use the az CLI. You will need your deployment name, which you can find out either by having a look at your bosh tasks or by creating a cf service-key and having a look at the hostname. In this example the deployment name is d13d357. Use the az CLI like so to find backups for your service instance:

az storage blob list --account-key 'your-account-key' --account-name 'your-account-name' --container-name 'your-container-name' --prefix=d13d357

Globally Setting Default Credentials

If you want all service instances to share one set of azure credentials you can do so by modifying the properties of the template-uploader job in your a9s Search service deployment, e.g.:

  properties:
    template-uploader:
      template-vars:
+       /search_backup_azure_account_name: 'your-account-name'
+       /search_backup_azure_account_key: 'your-account-key'
+     template-ops-files:
+     - ops/os-backup-azure-credentials.yml

Note: After adding those lines, the template uploader errand must be executed.