Use IBM Cloud Object Storage as Ark's storage destination.

You can deploy Ark on IBM Public or Private clouds, or even on any other Kubernetes cluster, but anyway you can use IBM Cloud Object Store as a destination for Ark’s backups.

To set up IBM Cloud Object Storage (COS) as Ark’s destination, you:

• Create your COS instance
• Create an S3 bucket
• Define a service that can store data in the bucket
• Configure and start the Ark server

Create COS instance

If you don’t have a COS instance, you can create a new one, according to the detailed instructions in Creating a new resource instance.

Create an S3 bucket

Heptio Ark requires an object storage bucket to store backups in. See instructions in Create some buckets to store your data.

Define a service that can store data in the bucket.

The process of creating service credentials is described in Service credentials. Several comments:

1. The Ark service will write its backup into the bucket, so it requires the “Writer” access role.

2. Ark uses an AWS S3 compatible API. Which means it authenticates using a signature created from a pair of access and secret keys — a set of HMAC credentials. You can create these HMAC credentials by specifying {“HMAC”:true} as an optional inline parameter. See step 3 in the Service credentials guide.

3. After successfully creating a Service credential, you can view the JSON definition of the credential. Under the cos_hmac_keys entry there are access_key_id and secret_access_key. We will use them in the next step.

4. Create an Ark-specific credentials file (credentials-ark) in your local directory:

   [default]
   aws_access_key_id=<ACCESS_KEY_ID>
   aws_secret_access_key=<SECRET_ACCESS_KEY>
   

   where the access key id and secret are the values that we got above.

Credentials and configuration

In the Ark directory (i.e. where you extracted the release tarball), run the following to first set up namespaces, RBAC, and other scaffolding. To run in a custom namespace, make sure that you have edited the YAML files to specify the namespace. See Run in custom namespace.

kubectl apply -f config/common/00-prereqs.yaml

Create a Secret. In the directory of the credentials file you just created, run:

kubectl create secret generic cloud-credentials \
    --namespace <ARK_NAMESPACE> \
    --from-file cloud=credentials-ark

Specify the following values in the example files:

• In config/ibm/05-ark-backupstoragelocation.yaml:

  • Replace <YOUR_BUCKET>, <YOUR_REGION> and <YOUR_URL_ACCESS_POINT>. See the BackupStorageLocation definition for details.

• (Optional) If you run the nginx example, in file config/nginx-app/with-pv.yaml:

  • Replace <YOUR_STORAGE_CLASS_NAME> with your StorageClass name.

Start the Ark server

In the root of your Ark directory, run:

kubectl apply -f config/ibm/05-ark-backupstoragelocation.yaml
kubectl apply -f config/ibm/10-deployment.yaml