Snapshots

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A snapshot is a .zip file that contains all relevant data describing the state of a Cloudify Manager the moment the snapshot is created on this Manager. There are four basic operations associated with snapshots: creating, downloading, uploading and restoring. For detailed information about snapshot-related CLI commands, click here.

Premium Version Feature

The ability to create and restore snapshots is a feature available to Premium version users.

Common use cases for snapshots are:

Backing up the Manager to be able to restore its state later on, should it become inconsistent or broken for whatever reason.
Migrating to a newer Cloudify Manager version, by creating a snapshot on the old manager and restoring it on the new one.
In this case, if you have any installed deployments, you also need to execute the install_new_agents workflow on the new Cloudify Manager so that all hosts agents are updated and connected to RabbitMQ on the new Cloudify Manager.

Security Note

Snapshots are security-sensitive. Broker IP, SSL certificates and credentials are stored in snapshots, in addition to keys to agent VMs if an appropriate flag was used on creating the snapshot.

A snapshot can only be successfully restored to a clean Cloudify Manager, meaning newly-created and without blueprints or deployments.
If you attempt to restore a snapshot to a Cloudify Manager that is not clean, the operation is not prevented, but will be unsuccessful.

Snapshot Contents

agents.json - this file contains data necessary for the install_new_agents workflow, mainly necessary to connect to the message broker of the Manager the snapshot has been created on.
pg_data - Dump of all PostgreSQL data, except for provider context, snapshots and the create snapshot execution that created the snapshot.
metadata.json - Helper file with flags telling the restore snapshot workflow how to proceed with its execution.
plugins - Folder containing all plugins uploaded to the Manager.
snapshot-credentials - .pem key files for all installed applications VMs.
blueprints - Extracted blueprints uploaded to the Manager.
uploaded-blueprints - Blueprints uploaded to the Manager as .tar.gz files.

Using the Web UI

Snapshot management is performed via the System Resources page in the Web interface. You must have admin credentials to create and restore snapshots.