Backup Buckets for External S3-Compatible Filestore Cannot Use a Different Endpoint

Products

• VMware Tanzu Platform Core

Issue/Introduction

When configuring External S3-compatible filestore in the TAS tile, customers may want their backup buckets (used for blobstore backup and restore) to reside on a different S3-compatible endpoint or host than the live buckets.

For example, a separate storage provider, a dedicated backup appliance, or an isolated network endpoint. This article explains why this is not currently possible and what options are available instead.

Cause

In the TAS tile's External S3-compatible filestore configuration, there is a single global URL endpoint field shared by the buildpacks, droplets, packages, and resources buckets. For backup, the tile exposes only a Backup region field and backup bucket name fields. The limitation is there is not a field for a Backup URL endpoint.

The backup functionality is implemented by the s3-unversioned-blobstore-backup-restorer and s3-versioned-blobstore-backup-restorer BOSH jobs (from backup-and-restore-sdk-release), which BBR co-locates with the deployment. In the underlying job property schema, each bucket's backup: only accepts name and region.  An endpoint property does not exist for the backup bucket. This means backup buckets are constrained to the same S3-compatible endpoint/host as their corresponding live buckets, even if the manifest is customized directly via an ops-file.

Resolution

There is currently no supported way to configure a separate endpoint/host for backup buckets, either through the Ops Manager tile or at the bosh manifest level.

If your goal is resiliency (not vendor/host separation), customer's can configure a different Backup region on the same endpoint. This is fully supported and is BBR's documented best practice (store live and backup buckets in different regions).

If you require backup buckets on a genuinely different endpoint or host, this is a product gap. Submit a feature request through your Tanzu account team, who can advise on next steps for getting it prioritized.