I’m always on the lookout for ways that new technology, found or forged, can make life easier, more productive, or both. A few years back, I started writing a bit of custom software, run on the cloud, that keeps track of notes, documents, images, appointments, crazy ideas, anniversaries, and links. It has since become an integral part of my day-to-day life, to a fault.
That fault is that I have a very rough time when it goes away. On May 17, at 8:39 in the morning, that’s exactly what it did.
More specifically, I learned that’s what the relational database system that drives the metadata engine did. It died. Gave up the ghost. Bought the farm. Lost the disks, and with them, the data.
It was not pretty.
You see, I spent so little time setting up the application runtime (for which I used Cloud Foundry), and the data backplane (which was just a service in the CF marketplace), that I didn’t put enough thought into data protection — no backups, no restore.
Getting the application code back up and running was the easy part — this is Cloud Foundry after all. Recovering the data was a different matter altogether. My only recourse was to re-enter, from my own flawed memory, all the data that I had lost.
Oh, and I vowed never to let that happen again. Let me introduce you to CF Protect.
This little plugin packs quite a punch. It interrogates your Cloud Foundry applications, looking for bound data services that it recognizes – things like MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc. It then makes some highly opinionated decisions, configuring scheduled data protection jobs in SHIELD, a cloud-based data protection solution.
Like my life-altering organizational software that relieved me of the minutiae of day-to-day life, this powerhouse of a plugin makes enough valuable decisions that I won’t need to spend time and energy figuring out my backups strategy.
If you’d like to see SHIELD in action, we’re holding a Hands-on Lab on February 23, 2021. We’ll set you up with a Cloud Foundry deployment, some data services, an application to deploy, and a free trial of SHIELD Cloud so that you can work along at home as we spin up an app, protect it, and then war-game some disaster scenarios.
Go here to register for the lab. See you then!
And, for a more in-depth post on the CF-Protect project, read this.
