Snapshots

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Overview

Snapshot is a .zip file that contains all relevant data describing the state of a Cloudify Manager the moment the snapshot is created on this Manager. There are basically four operations associated with snapshots: creating, downloading, uploading and restoring them. For detailed information about snapshots related CLI commands, please visit this link.

Common use cases for snapshots are:

Backing up the Manager to be able to restore its state later on, should it become inconsistent or broken for whatever reason.
Migrating to a newer Cloudify Manager version, by creating a snapshot on the old manager and restoring it on the new one. In this case, if you have any installed deployments, you should also execute the install_new_agents workflow on the new manager so that all hosts agents get updated and connected to the new manager’s RabbitMQ.

Security note

Snapshots are security-sensitive. Broker IP, SSL certificates and credentials are stored in snapshots, as well as keys to agent VMs if an aprropriate flag was used on creating the snapshot.

Known issue

If you create a snapshot on a Cloudify Manager, delete all blueprints and restore the snapshot on the same Manager, events will be duplicated.

Known Limitation

A snapshot can only be successfully restored to a clean manager, meaning newly created and without blueprints or deployments.

Known issue

If you try to restore a snapshot to a non clean manager, the operation will not be prevented but will be unsuccessful.

Snapshot Contents

agents.json - this file contains data necessary for the install_new_agents workflow, mainly necessary to connect to the message broker of the Manager the snapshot has been created on.
es_data - Dump of all ElasticSearch data except for provider context, snapshots and the create snapshot execution that created the snapshot.
metadata.json - Helper file with flags telling the restore snapshot workflow how to proceed with its execution.
plugins - Folder containing all plugins uploaded to the Manager.
snapshot-credentials - .pem key files for all installed applications VMs.
blueprints - Extracted blueprints uploaded to the Manager.
uploaded-blueprints - Blueprints uploaded to the Manager as .tar.gz files.

Using the Web UI

Snapshots management is done through the settings section in the Web UI.

Advanced Topics

Creating a snapshot on a Cloudify Manager 3.2.X

To create a snapshot on a 3.2/3.2.1 Cloudify Manager, use the cloudify-3.2.1-snapshots-tool. Its purpose is to make creating snapshots on Cloudify Managers 3.2.X possible - this feature has been introduced in the 3.3 version and is not available on earlier versions out of the box. Please see the README.md file in the tool’s repository for more details.