Attaching the disk with same device-path or UUID - google-cloud-platform

I had one disk attached to an instance & i had taken snapshot of it.
Now, after few days - the disk went bad and i want to restore the disk.
What i have implemented is :
Store metadata of snapshot, when taken
When restore request comes, i create new disk from snapshot
detach original disk (say attached inside host as /dev/sdz )
attach Newly created disk to the same instance
With this way, the user will get the view that the disk has been restored using the snapshot he had taken.
Now, the problem i'm seeing with this approach is :
as the original disk was attached as /dev/sdz, after detach & attach of NEW disk, the new disk should be seen as /dev/sdz ONLY,
Otherwise the application or upper-layers may break.
So, is there any provision that google-cloud APIs provide to handle this ?
PLEASE NOTE: I'm using google-api-python-client library & code is in Python.

I believe the name you are referring to is the "index" of the disk. I am not sure of that however. If that is the case, you would just need to make sure the index of the new disk matches the index of the disk you remove.
That being said, there are better ways to do this if you can modify your fstab. For example, you can use the "deviceName" by mounting /dev/disk/by-id/whatever in which case you would just need to make sure that the new disk has the same deviceName as the old disk.
Another option is to use the UUID of the filesystem to mount. Since these new disks are snapshots of the old disk, they will have the same UUID.
ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/
That should not change unless you reformat the partition entirely. In your fstab, instead of /dev/sdz1, you would use UUID=ef7481ea-a6f9-425b-940f-56e9c93492dd or whatever.

Related

Can I programatically retrieve the directory an EFS Recovery Point was restored to?

I'm trying to restore data in EFS from recovery points managed by AWS Backup. It seems AWS Backup does not support destructive restores and will always restore to a directory in the target EFS file system, even when creating a new one.
I would like to sync the data extracted from such a recovery point to another volume, but right now I can only do this manually as I need to lookup the directory name that is used by the start-restore-job operation (e.g. aws-backup-restore_2022-05-16T11-01-17-599Z), as stated in the docs:
You can restore those items to either a new or existing file system. Either way, AWS Backup creates a new Amazon EFS directory (aws-backup-restore_datetime) off of the root directory to contain the items.
Further looking through the documentation I can't find either of:
an option to set the name of the directory used
the value of directory name returned in any call (either start-restore-job or describe-restore-job)
I have also checked how the datetime portion of the directory name maps to the creationDate and completionDate of the restore job but it seems neither match (completionDate is very close, but it's not the exact same timestamp).
Is there any way for me to do one of these two things? Both of them missing make restoring a file system from a recovery point in an automated fashion very hard.
Is there any way for me to do one of these two things?
As it stands, no.
However, since we know that the directory will always be in the root, doing find . -type d -name "aws-backup-restore_*" should return the directory name to you. You could also further filter this down based on the year, month, day, hour & minute.
You could have something polling the job status on the machine that has the EFS file system mounted, finding the correct directory and then pushing that to AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store for later retrieval. If restoring to a new file system, this of course becomes more difficult but still doable in an automated fashion.
If you're not mounting this on an EC2 instance, for example, running a Lambda with the EFS file system mounted, will let you obtain the directory & then push it to Parameter Store for retrieval elsewhere. The Lambda service mounts EFS file systems when the execution environment is prepared - in other words, during the 'cold start' duration so there are no extra costs here for extra invocation time & as such, would be the cheapest option.
There's no built-in way via the APIs however to obtain the directory or configure it so you're stuck there.
It's an AWS failure that neither do they return the filename that they use in any way nor does any of the metadata returned - creationDate/completionData - exactly match the timestamp they use to name the file.
If you're an enterprise customer, suggest this as a missing feature to your TAM or SA.

Disk clean up in Apache geode

I have set up apache geode for caching.
Cluster Configuration:
Locator: 1GB - Mounted volume 2GB
Server2: 1GB - Mounted volume 2GB
Server2: 1GB - Mounted volume 2GB
Region configuration in cache.xml
<region name="answerCache">
<region-attributes data-policy="PARTITION_PERSISTENT_OVERFLOW">
<eviction-attributes>
<lru-heap-percentage action="overflow-to-disk" />
</eviction-attributes>
</region-attributes>
</region>
Geode pushes the data to disk (based on LRU) when region fills with data.
But I'm not getting any configuration where geode lets me delete entry from disk if its getting filled.
I'm getting Out of memory error if disk gets full.
I want to apply LRU on disk writes as well so that least used entries can be deleted from disk.
I don't think there's a feature like this embedded within Apache Geode at the moment and, according to how I see it, it wouldn't make much sense to add it either way. The overflow feature basically limits the region size in memory by moving the values of least recently used (LRU) entries to disk (values only), the keys are kept in memory with a "pointer" to the actual entry on disk so they can be recovered whenever needed.
If you want to remove entries from the disk-store, you first need to delete them from the actual Region on memory (Region.destroy, Region.remove, etc.), Apache Geode will handle the deletion process and remove the entry from disk as well, automatically.
Cheers.
You can use GFSH disk store commands to manage disk stores. You can even use a GUI (https://github.com/ldom22/GGGUI)

Is it safe to apply Terraform plan when it says the database instance must be replaced?

I'm importing the existing resources (AWS RDS) but the terraform plan command showed a summary:
#aws_db_instance.my_main_db must be replaced
+/- resource "aws_db_instance" "my_main_db" {
~ address = x
allocated_storage = x
+ apply_immediately = x
~ arn = x
~ username = x
+ password = x
(others arguments with alot of +/- and ~)
}
my_main_db is online with persistent data. My question is as the title; Is it safe for the existing database to run terrafrom apply? I don't want to lose all my customer data.
"Replace" in Terraform's terminology means to destroy the existing object and create a new one to replace it. The +/- symbol (as opposed to -/+) indicates that this particular resource will be replaced in the "create before destroy" mode, where there will briefly be two database instances existing during the operation. (This may or may not be possible in practice, depending on whether the instance name is changing as part of this operation.)
For aws_db_instance in particular, destroying an instance is equivalent to deleting the instance in the RDS console: unless you have a backup of the contents of the database, it will be lost. Even if you do have a backup, you'll need to restore it via the RDS console or API rather than with Terraform because Terraform doesn't know about the backup/restore mechanism and so its idea of "create" is to produce an entirely new, empty database.
To sum up: applying a plan like this directly is certainly not generally "safe", because Terraform is planning to destroy your database and all of the contents along with it.
If you need to make changes to your database that cannot be performed without creating an entirely new RDS instance, you'll usually need to make those changes outside of Terraform using RDS-specific tools so that you can implement some process for transferring data between the old and new instances, whether that be backup and then restore (which will require a temporary outage) or temporarily running both instances and setting up replication from old to new until you are ready to shut off the old one. The details of such a migration are outside of Terraform's scope, because they are specific to whatever database engine you are using.
It's most likely not safe, but really only someone familiar with the application can make that decision. Look at the properties and what is going to change or be recreated. Unless you are comfortable with all of those properties changing, then it's not safe.

Best way to retire an index

I am retiring an old elastic search index in AWS that has not received a new document since 2016. However, something is still trying to search it.
I still want deprecate this index in a manner manner where I can get back to the original state quickly. I have created a manual snapshot of the index and it is sitting in S3. I was planning on deleting the domain, but, from what I understand, that deletes everything billable under AWS including the end point. As I mentioned above, I want to be able to get back to the original state of the index. So this domain contains a series of indexes. The largest index is 20.5 Gb. I was going to delete the large index and resize the cluster to a smaller instance size and footprint. Will this work or will it be unsearchable?
I've no experience using Elasticsearch on AWS, but I have an idea about your index.
You say the index has received no new documents for a long time. If this also means no deletions and no updates, you could theoretically just take this index to a new cluster, using either snapshot + restore, or a cross-cluster reindex. Continue operating your old cluster until you're sure the new one is working well.
Again - not familiar with AWS terminology, but it sounds like this approach translates to using separate "domains". First you fully ensure the new "domain" is working with the right hardware spec and data, and then delete the old "domain".
TL;DR -> yes!
The backup to S3 will work, but the documents will be unsearchable because in order to downsize the storage you have to delete the index.
But if someday you want to restore the data from S3 back to the index, you can.
You can resize instances and storage sizes with no downtime, however, that takes a long time and you pay extra for the machines while they are resizing.
Example:
you change your storage size from 100gb to 99gb
elasticsearch service will spin up another instance, copy all your data from the old instance to the new one and then delete the old one.
same for instance sizes.
machine up, cluster sync, machine down.
while they are syncing, you pay for them.
your plan will work, es is very flexible.
if you really don't trust aws, just make a json export from the index and keep it on s3 too, just in case things go south.

What happen when I increase the size of running volume of ec2 instance

My question is so simple:
What happens when I increase the size of running volume of ec2 instance.
1) Does my all data wiped ?
2) Does the space of my instance will also modify with new size ?
Actually my instance has storage of 8GB and that is almost full. I want to increase space that can help me to save more files to my instance.
I have found this option in my console.
I have found that connected ec2 volume. Does directly modifying the volume size will automatically reflect my instance space after reboot.
I
know this is quiet simple. I am just worried about my existing data.
Thank you for your help !
Assuming you have found the option in console to modify the size of the instance and the Instance here is Linux Instance. What the other answer forgets to mentions an important thing that is according to AWS Documentation:
Modifying volume size has no practical effect until you also extend
the volume's file system to make use of the new storage capacity. For
more information, see Extending a Linux File System after Resizing the
Volume.
For ext2, ext3, and ext4 file systems, this command is resize2fs. For XFS file systems, this command is xfs_growfs
Note:
If the volume you are extending has been partitioned, you need to increase the size of the partition before you can resize the file system
To check if your volume partition needs resizing:
Use the lsblk command to list the block devices attached to your instance. The example below shows three volumes: /dev/xvda, /dev/xvdb, and /dev/xvdf.
In Case if the partition occupies all of the room on the device, so it does not need resizing.
However, /dev/xvdf1if is an 8-GiB partition on a 35-GiB device and there are no other partitions on the volume. In this case, the partition must be resized in order to use the remaining space on the volume.
To extend a Linux file system
Log In to Instance via SSH
Use the df -h command to report the existing disk space usage on the file system.
Expand the modified partition using growpart (and note the unusual syntax of separating the device name from the partition number):
sudo growpart /dev/xvdf 1
Then Use a file system-specific command to resize each file system to the new volume capacity.
Finally Use the df -h command to report the existing file system disk space usage
Note : It is Recommended to take snapshot of ebs volume before making any changes.
Please Refer to this AWS Documentation
Well you can just modify the volume directly and this will not affect any file, it will take around 1 min or so to upgrade the size or you might want to restart your instance.
to ensure data safety you can create a snapshot of that volume and from that snapshot create a new volume of whatever size you want and delete the old volume which now contains old data.