Database Backup with Kubernetes Cron Job

Introduction #

If you have a self-managed database for your projects, it is hard to manage the backups. You can use db-backup tool to create a backup on the S3 bucket easily within your cluster.

Prerequisites #

Before you get started, you will need to have a number of things.

1. A running Kubernetes cluster.
2. kubectl installed. If not, you will need it to manage your clusters.
3. Have a KUBECONFIG file (default location is ~/.kube/config).

What is Cron Job #

Kubernetes CronJob is a job that repeats itself with a given schedule. CronJob is a perfect fit for creating a database backup for your self-managed database.

Create CronJob #

Let’s create backup-cronjob.yaml with the given content.

apiVersion: batch/v1beta1
kind: CronJob
metadata:
  name: database-backup-job
  namespace: default
spec:
  schedule: "0 0 * * *"
  jobTemplate:
    spec:
      template:
        spec:
          restartPolicy: OnFailure
          containers:
            - name: db-backup
              image: "ghcr.io/omegion/db-backup:v0.9.0"
              imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
              args:
                - s3
                - export
                - --host=$DB_HOST
                - --port=$DB_PORT
                - --databases=$DATABASE_NAMES
                - --username=$DB_USER
                - --password=$DB_PASS
                - --bucket=$BUCKET_NAME
              env:
                - name: DB_HOST
                  value: ""
                - name: DB_PORT
                  value: ""
                - name: DB_USER
                  value: ""
                - name: DB_PASS
                  value: ""
                - name: DATABASE_NAMES
                  value: ""
                - name: BUCKET_NAME
                  value: ""
                - name: AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
                  value: ""
                - name: AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
                  value: ""
                - name: AWS_REGION
                  value: ""

Now, we can create CronJob with kubectl.

kubectl apply -f backup-cronjob.yaml

Verify CronJob #

Let’s verify that the CronJob is created successfully.

kubectl get cronjob database-backup-job                                             
NAME                  SCHEDULE    SUSPEND   ACTIVE   LAST SCHEDULE   AGE
database-backup-job   0 0 * * *   False     0        <none>          27s

Test CronJob #

The CronJob that we created will be executed every day. So, let’s create a temporary job from the CronJob that we can test our Job.

kubectl create job --from=cronjob/database-backup-job database-backup-job-manual-001

Conclusion #

In this tutorial, we created a CronJob to create database backups for our self-managed database.