# Velero Office Hours

This is a place for schedules, notes, and resources stemming from the Velero Office Hours.

Come join us for Velero Office Hours every 2nd and 4th Thursday at 1-2pm ET / 10am-11am PT. To get an automatic calendar invite, join the [Velero distribution list](https://groups.google.com/g/projectvelero).

The schedule below reflects topics that will be discussed unless other topics arise during the office hours, and topics from a previous time slot can then be moved to the next.

[Zoom link](https://VMware.zoom.us/j/99798698950?pwd=Z2FRZDlpbUNyeGVmREtkS05lck5xZz09)

[YouTube playlist of recordings](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7bmigfV0EqSCG5YaDIuexfs9kDbiGcQg)

## Office Hours schedule:

### 2021:

* May 26
* Plugin Versioning discussion
* Design doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/11LMzw79D-bOANrUgvoHcaEzz1MT-Wh-3_C6ufp4r8sk/edit?usp=sharing

* February 11
* Attendees
* Lukas from [NRD.de](https://www.ndr.de/)
* Shirish
* Lukas is interested in getting backup and DR implemented for their new K8s environment, looking at [backup and restore hooks](https://velero.io/docs/v1.5/backup-hooks/) to get more consistent backups
* Shirish is a golang developer - wondering if Velero is supporting only one backup location - Velero does support multiple backup locations per cluster
* However, there is a limit of one credential per provider
* New feature request: Built-in from one backup location to another, i.e. from Minio to AWS S3
* How to manage Velero through UIs, using Velero's API types: https://velero.io/docs/v1.5/api-types/
* [Requesting more examples on how to use these](https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/velero/issues/3451)

* January 14
* Attendees:
* Ritesh Patel from Nirmata
* Sebastien FELIX from Orange
* Ritesh wanted to present their work with https://kyverno.io/, scheduled for community meeting Jan 26
* Sebastien is managing DBs, and want to make backups of volumes using Velero - how to handle multitenancy?
* Wants to open up issues and work on PRs to handle multitenancy issues

### 2020:

* December 10
* Rodolfo Martines from Rackspace wanted to see if some work can be done on a deprecated API in K8s 1.18. https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/velero/pull/2182
* [Good first issues](https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/velero/labels/Good%20first%20issue)
* [Help wanted issues](https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/velero/labels/Help%20wanted)
* [Michal Hudy](https://github.com/hudymi) has a question regarding https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/velero/issues/3164
*

* November 12
- Openshift on premise, and openshift in Azure, want to have both back up to a storage location that is in Azure. There are restrictions with the on-premise installation that require a private endpoint to be used to link to the storage account, rather than specifying the storage account directly. Is it possible to provide configuration that uses the endpoint?
- The Azure provider does not allow this configuration. This would require custom tooling.
- Is this tooling something that the Velero community could provide? There isn't a standard for how these custom endpoints operate so there isn't something specific that we can implement.
- For [e2e testing](https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/velero/pull/3060), have we considered running a Kubernetes cluster in GitHub?
- We use KinD for our existing testing. Our aim with the e2e testing is to decouple the infrastucture provisioning from the tests themselves.
- What is the Kibishii project that is referenced in the e2e branch? It is a data generator tool: https://github.com/vmware-tanzu-labs/distributed-data-generator

* October 22
- Is cross cluster migration on the roadmap?
- We do have support for it.
- You take a backup of a cluster and all the cluster objects are in the configured object storage.
- When restoring a new cluster, you will need to make sure that the new cluster has access to the object storage bucket where the backups from the original cluster were written to.
- Velero will then read those backups for the original cluster and restore them to the new cluster.
- For cross cluster migration of persistent volumes, it is necessary to use restic.
- Note: There are some details missing from our documentation on how to provide credentials to Velero.
- How does the Velero CLI communicate with the Velero server?
- Is there a REST API? Communication happens via the creation of CRDs. The Velero controllers process those CRDs and as part of the reconciliation loop, will start the backup/restore operations.
- Velero communicates with the Kubernetes API server, not etcd.
- Velero is purpose built for Kubernetes using Kubernetes.
- When backups are in progress, we can see the state and logs. Is there a way to view the backup progress?
- In Velero 1.4, backup progress was introduced. There is a field on the Backup object which details the number of items to backup and the number of items that have been backed up so far. We don't maintain a list of the items to be backed up as it difficult to keep this up to date during the backup progress. However, once the backup is complete, the list of all resources that were in the backup can be viewed using `velero backup describe <backup-name>` and checking the `Resource List`. It also differentiates between Kubernetes resources and restic backups.
- TODO: Details of the progress item are missing from the API documentation. We should add this.
- Demo of Velero using MinIO
- MinIO running in a docker container outside the cluster. Instructions to run this are available on our [FAQ page](https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/velero/wiki/Contributing-FAQ#how-do-i-run-minio-locally-on-my-computer-as-a-standalone-as-opposed-to-running-it-on-a-pod)
- Using velero-plugin-for-aws as MinIO is an S3 compatible storage.
- Using CSI hostpath driver to provision volumes on a KinD cluster.
- Restic demo:
- Enabled using either opt-in or opt-out. More on this [here](https://velero.io/docs/v1.5/restic/#to-back-up)
- Getting started with contributing to Velero
- Please see our docs on
- [Contributing](https://velero.io/docs/v1.5/start-contributing/)
- [Joining the Velero community](https://velero.io/community/)
- Twitter [@projectvelero](https://twitter.com/projectvelero)
- Kubenetes Slack [#velero](https://kubernetes.slack.com/messages/velero)
- [Google Group](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/projectvelero)

* October 8

* Sept 24
* What is Velero
- A tool to safely backup, recover and migrate applications running in kubernetes along with their persistent volumes.
- This is a solution purpose built for Kubernetes using Kubernetes Constructs.
* How does Velero run backups and restores? What happens under the covers?
- There are two components to Velero:
- CLI client
- Server running as a pod in kubernetes
- The client and the server components don't interact with each other over network connection, but use the Kubernetes Custom Resource Definiton construct to communicate.
- The client creates the CRD API objects which the server pod which runns a reconciliation loop for these CRD types watches and reconciles the objects. For example, if a `Backup` object is created, the server, in the processss of reconciliation will perform the backup operation.
- Some of the other CRDs are: Backup, Restore, Schedules, BackupStorageLocation, etc...
Refer to our [API types docs](https://velero.io/docs/v1.5/api-types/) for more information
- Reference for more details: [How Velero Works?](https://velero.io/docs/v1.5/how-velero-works/)

* What's the difference between a PV backup and a restic backup?
- Backup of applications using persistent volumes will include volume backups as well.
- Velero can perform volume snapshotting operations native to the volume provider using VolumeSnapshotter plugins specific to the volume provider. For cases where, a Velero VolumeSnapshotter plugin doesn't exist for a volume provider or if the volume provider doesn't support snapshotting operations Velero's Restic integration can be used.
- Restic Integration:
- Restic is a 3rd party tool that Velero integrates with to perform filesystem level backups of persistent volumes.
- Velero handles installation and setup of restic as part of Velero installation.
- Refer to our [restic integration docs](https://velero.io/docs/v1.5/restic/) for more information.
* References and resources on some of the topics that were covered:
* [Velero website](https://velero.io)
* [Velero API typpes](https://velero.io/docs/v1.5/api-types/)
* [Backup Hooks](https://velero.io/docs/v1.5/backup-hooks/) for quiescing and unquiescing applications before and after backup.
* [Restore Hooks](https://velero.io/docs/v1.5/restore-hooks/) to customize application restores to perform any necessary setup before the restored application pods can run.

### Future Episodes
* Oct 22
* Demo: How to do a backup and recovery in Velero
* How to contribute to Velero
* Question: How to use Velero to do offsite backups of rook-ceph?
* Nov 12
* TBD
* Nov 26
* Thanksgiving, enjoy the week off!
* Dec 10
* TBD
* Dec 24
* Holiday!
* Jan 14
* We're back!
* Jan 28
* TBD