Nov
01
2014
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Backup and restore of MySQL to OpenStack Swift

MySQL database usage is popular in OpenStack. Core OpenStack services for Compute (Nova), Storage (Cinder), Neutron (Networking), Image (Glance) and Identity (Keystone) all use MySQL database.

MySQL – as the world’s most popular database, runs inside OpenStack Virtual Machines and serves as database backend to OpenStack cloud based applications. The MySQL instances can be configured to run in virtual machines manually (by simply installing MySQL inside a VM and running it) or can be created in an on-demand fashion by OpenStack Database-as-a-Service (Trove).

In either case, the MySQL data is mission-critical. OpenStack cloud administrators and cloud guests/tenants need the ability to backup and restore their MySQL databases. mysqldump is traditional way of doing MySQL backups and restores. However, based on previous experiences of the MySQL community, it is widely known that mysqldump has limitations especially when it comes to speed of backup and restore as databases grow larger.

Percona XtraBackup overcomes these limitations and enables faster, non-blocking MySQL backups and restores on larger datasets. It also offers other important abilities such as streaming and encryption. It works with MySQL as well as all the variants such as Percona Server and MariaDB. And all this is open source and free. Percona XtraBackup is popular and widely used in the MySQL community. More recently it has seen adoption within OpenStack context. It is at the heart of backup/restore for Rackspace Cloud DbaaS. OpenStack Database-as-a-Service (Trove) implementation uses Percona XtraBackup as a pluggable backend for database backup and restore.

Until now, however, Percona XtraBackup did not have the ability to do streaming backup and restores of MySQL databases to cloud storage targets such as OpenStack Swift or Amazon Web Services S3. xbcloud tool is a new contribution from Percona that changes this. At a basic level, the tool enables MySQL backups to OpenStack Swift.

OpenStack Swift is the Object Service of OpenStack. It offers a high availability data storage platform that scales horizontally and offers disaster recovery of data across multiple datacenters and geographies. It is the default and popular choice for storing backups of infrastructure and tenant data in OpenStack clouds.

How does xbcloud tool work? xbcloud uploads and downloads full or part of xbstream archive to/from OpenStack Swift. So what is xbstream? xbstream is a streaming format available in Percona XtraBackup that overcomes some limitations of traditional archive formats such as tar, cpio and others which did not allow streaming dynamically generated files, for example dynamically compressed files.

Archive uploading will employ multipart upload for Large Objects on Swift. Along with this, the xbstream archive index file will be uploaded which contains list of files and their parts and offsets of those parts in xbstream archive. This index is needed for downloading only part of archive (one or several tables from backups) on demand.

Details of usage and examples follow.

Backup:

innobackupex --stream=xbstream /tmp | xbcloud [options] put <name>

Example:

innobackupex --stream=xbstream --extra-lsndir=/tmp /tmp |
xbcloud put --storage=Swift
--swift-container=test
--swift-user=test:tester
--swift-url=http://192.168.8.80:8080/
--swift-key=testing
--parallel=10
full_backup

Restore:

xbcloud [options] get <name> [<list-of-files>] | xbstream -x

Example:

xbcloud get --storage=Swift
--swift-container=test
--swift-user=test:tester
--swift-url=http://192.168.8.80:8080/
--swift-key=testing
full_backup | xbstream -xv -C /tmp/downloaded_full
innobackupex --apply-log /tmp/downloaded_full
innobackupex --copy-back /tmp/downloaded_full

Interested? Try it out. Percona XtraBackup and xbcloud are open source and free. You can find instructions to download, usage and release notes for PXB 2.3 Alpha (which includes xbcloud) here.

So what is next? We at Percona are excited about the possibilities with this new xbcloud tool and Percona Xtrabackup in general. Our most immediate next steps would be to act on community feedback, address bugs and issues and move towards GA soon.

Beyond that we are looking to enhance xbcloud to support other cloud platforms such as AWS S3 and Google Cloud Engine.

We would love to hear from you on this. You could either leave feedback directly as comments to this post or can file enhancement requests and bugs here.

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