When organizations move applications to the Google Cloud, they tend to move databases to cloud-managed databases like CloudSQL. It is advantageous for the database teams to remove most of the day to day infrastructure operations so they can focus on managing higher-level functions closer to applications. CloudSQL also offers basic backup and recovery with pre-defined RPOs. However, it is not sufficient for many organizations as they want to customize their RPOs based on their business needs and application requirements.
Why legacy backup and recovery not sufficient for the cloud-enabled and cloud-native environments?
Moving to the cloud offers an initial cost reduction. It also provides increased application resiliency in a way that was not possible in the data center. Cloud applications built around CloudSQL should be able to leverage GCP infrastructure service capabilities such as incremental snapshots and global replication to achieve better RPO and RTOs.
True Disaster Recovery Never Worked in the Data Center
Disaster recovery for application environments never fully worked in the data center world. It’s too expensive, too time-consuming and never satisfied the need for the application recovery. Thus, DR simply became a chore for compliance reasons. Frequently, disaster recoveries are outsourced to third parties with a special data center that takes another copy of virtual machines and databases but not really satisfying the true resiliency requirements for the enterprise.
Cloud platforms like GCP, with software-defined, compute, storage, networking, DNS and security on a global hyper-converged infrastructure make true application resilience possible. Yes, backup and recovery are important but bringing data center style protection to the cloud is unnecessary and usually too costly as well. What our customers have been consistently telling us is that the application environment is what really matters to achieve true application resilience.
Combining CloudSQL Backup and Disaster Recovery with Network and Security Configuration Protection
Application environments on GCP not only include instances of virtual machines, containers, and Cloud SQL but also includes networking, load balancers, DNS, firewalls, and routes and their configurations. All of these cloud resource instances need to be protected and recovered in order to achieve true cloud application resilience.
Appranix Application Resilience for Cloud SQL based Environments
Appranix automatically discovers GCP resources so customers can protect an entire GCP application environment. Appranix assembles all the cloud resources to create a cloud assembly from a simple selection of virtual machines and CloudSQL instances. Appranix then creates all the necessary GCP Deployment Manager Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) by identifying all other infrastructure dependencies without any human intervention. Deployment Manager IaC is versioned and configurations are journaled per organization SLOs. They simply input policies based on their RPO requirements based on their business requirements. Appranix will automatically create and maintain an Application Environment Time Machine.
Single Touch Recovery for Entire GCP Application Environment
Achieving application resilience is not hard. You can test your recoveries or perform an actual failover of CloudSQL based application environment quickly with a simple click by accessing a timeline item. After the test, you can reset the entire environment with another click/touch. It is that simple. Appranix Cloud Resilience Service takes care of everything else, including coding and running infrastructure-as-code as well as recovering from CloudSQL backup along with all the configurations from the production environment automatically.
