Adding Backup/Restore capabilities.

[HoustonPutman]

I imagine that this would be implemented as two additional CRDs, SolrCloudBackup and SolrCloudRestore.

We would likely use the Solr Collections API Backup & Restore capability.

The CRDs would take as input:

• A volume to store/retrieve the backup data in/from
• An optional list of collections to backup/restore. If not passed, all collections will be done
• The namespace and name of the solr cloud to backup

Progress and completeness would be conveyed through the Status section of each CRD.

[kcmartin]

I see you merged backup capabilities #14 -- Is there any documentation available about usage/how to perform backups? Thanks!

[HoustonPutman]

Hey Kristin,

In general we need to work on documentation, but there's a bit in the README on the requirements to make backups work. I also need to cut a release of the operator, so that you can use the backup functionality. I'll try to beef up the documentation over the next few days and also cut a release.

[kcmartin]

Great to hear @HoustonPutman !

[kcmartin]

Are there any updates on restore functionality? @HoustonPutman

[HoustonPutman]

Hey @kcmartin, sorry for the delay on this. I know backups are kind of useless without being able to restore. I think I'll be able to put some work into it early next month. Hopefully it doesn't take too long, as the workflow should basically be the opposite of the backup controller.

Have y'all played around with the backup CRDs yet? Or are you waiting on the restore functionality?

[kcmartin]

Hi @HoustonPutman, thanks, I think my teammates have experimented with the backup CRDs a bit... My plan is to wait and do more tests once the restore capability is available. :)

[timterle]

@HoustonPutman
We use NFS and encountered a "permission denied" issue. The solr user doesn't have permission to write to the NFS shared volume. We added this init container to the statefulset which resolved the issue:

{
          Name:                     "backup",
          Image:                    solrCloud.Spec.BusyBoxImage.ToImageName(),
          ImagePullPolicy:          solrCloud.Spec.BusyBoxImage.PullPolicy,
          TerminationMessagePath:   "/dev/termination-log",
          TerminationMessagePolicy: "File",
          SecurityContext: &corev1.SecurityContext{
                  RunAsUser: &runAsUser,
           },
           Command:                  []string{"sh", "-c", "chown " + strconv.Itoa(int(fsGroup)) + " " + BaseBackupRestorePath},
           VolumeMounts: []corev1.VolumeMount{
                     {
                               Name:      BackupRestoreVolume,
                               MountPath: BaseBackupRestorePath,
                               SubPath: BackupRestoreSubPathForCloud(solrCloud.Name),
                      },
            },
}

and this is in solrcloud.yaml:

backupRestoreVolume:
    nfs:
      path: /
      server: BACKUP_ENDPOINT

It would be great if there was a nicer workaround, but I didn't find any. Does it make sense to add this to the operator?

[HoustonPutman]

That makes sense to me. Does it still allow the Kube Job to copy the backup to S3 or another volume? We might have to change the runAsUser of that job as well.

[plumdog]

I am curious as to backup and restore options. Is there currently any viable way of backing up and restoring a collection? Either at the application level, or maybe by providing an existing PV (in my case, on AWS, I could create these from EBS snapshots, perhaps).

Is "there is no current way to restore these backups" completely true? Or just that there's no method supported by this project? Does the existing backup functionality make use of https://solr.apache.org/guide/8_1/collections-api.html#backup ? In which case I could handle the restore myself by retrieving the backup (eg from S3) and making a request to the Solr API, perhaps?

I'm really anxious to migrate to this project, rather than using our existing home-grown Solr chart. But for all its faults, it does allow me to quickly restore using EBS snapshots. I would like to understand any potential recovery process that exists now or might exist soon.

[HoustonPutman]

The backup should work, but it is tested less than the other options.

There is no way to restore that is supported by the project. You should still be able to load the backup data into the shared backup/restore PV yourself, then issue the commands to restore via the Collections API. (The operator generates the backup via that Collections API command you linked)

It is possible, and there have been people that have used the backup functionality, then restored via their own methods.

In Solr 9.0, there will be much easier backup/restore functionality that should work natively with S3, and won't require any intervention with the Operator. You will be able to do it entirely via Solr API commands. You can follow that progress here: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SOLR-15086