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Data Backup Service

[Team | TBC] [Tech Lead | rh841] [Service Owner | amc203] [Service Manager | ad2139] [Product Manager | TBC]

This page gives an overview of the Data Backup Service, describing its current status, where and how it's developed and deployed, and who is responsible for maintaining it.

Service Description

Data Backup Service performs data exports of products hosted in GCP. It currently supports the exporting of data from Cloud SQL databases to a GCP bucket.

Service Status

The Data Backup Service is currently live.

Contact

Technical queries and support should be directed to cloud@uis.cam.ac.uk and will be picked up by a member of the team working on the service. To ensure that you receive a response, always direct requests to cloud@uis.cam.ac.uk` rather than reaching out to team members directly.

Issues discovered in the service or new feature requests should be opened as GitLab issues in the application repository.

Environments

The Data Backup Service is currently deployed to the following environments:

Name Cloud Scheduler Backup Bucket
Production sql-backup data-backup-prod-63bdb80a
Development sql-backup data-backup-devel-37d7c4f2

Source code

The source code for the Data Backup Service is spread over the following repositories:

Repository Description
Application Server The source code for the main application server
Infrastructure Deployment The Terraform infrastructure code for deploying the application server to GCP

Technologies used

The following gives an overview of the technologies the Data Backup Service is built on.

Category Language Framework(s)
Server Python 3.11 FastAPI 0.110.3
GCP deployment Terraform 1.7 Google Cloud Platform

Operational documentation

The following gives an overview of how the Data Backup Service is deployed and maintained.

Which databases are exported

All databases discovered in any child GCP projects of the configured folders are exported. Exlusion patterns can be configured to exclude project databases from being exported, such as in development projects.

The configuration is controlled by the scheduled job in the Data Backup Service Terraform infrastructure and can be found in the following file:

How and where the Data Backup Service is deployed

Deployment is via our standard terraform deployment CI pipeline.

Deploying a new release

Making a new release of the application is done via release automation. In short: merged commits are collected together into a draft "next release" Merge Request. When merged, a new release tag is pushed to the repository along with a Docker image being pushed to Google's Artefact registry.

Deployment is done by:

  1. Updating the deployment project's repository with any changes, including bumping the deployed web application release.
  2. Using the "play" buttons in the CI pipeline to deploy to production when happy. (Deployments to staging happen automatically on merges to main.)

Monitoring

Monitoring is configured as per our standard Google Cloud Run application module.

Additional documentation

Information about the overall architecture of the new Data Backup System can be found in:

Service Management

The Team responsible for this service is TBC.

The Tech Lead for this service is rh841.

The Service Owner for this service is amc203.

The Service Manager for this service is ad2139.

The Product Manager for this service is TBC.

The following engineers have operational experience with this service and are able to respond to support requests or incidents: