In the first use case, we demonstrated how to use NetApp Astra Control Center to protect your applications in Kubernetes. That section describes how to integrate application backups via Astra Control directly into your development workflow by using the Python SDK in the NetApp Astra toolkit. This approach allows for the protection of development and production environments by automating on-demand backups during the continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) process. With this extra layer of application-consistent data protection added to the CI/CD pipeline and the production applications, the development processes is safe if something goes wrong in the process, which promotes good business-continuity practices.

In a traditional workflow, after encountering a failure when the application is upgraded to a new version, the development team would attempt to troubleshoot the issue in real time based on bug reports being provided by customers. Alternatively, at the first sign of trouble, the team could attempt to redeploy the application to a parallel debugging environment to take that process offline. They could redeploy an older code base from a previous version into production, which would restore the application to working order.

Although this approach works, the team would have to make sure that the state of the broken production app matched that of the version seen in production when the issues occurred. They would also have to spend time promoting the known-good build into production by fetching code from their repository and redeploying the machine images to restore the application to a good running state. Also, in this scenario, we didn't consider whether the production database itself was corrupted by the faulty code. Ideally, there are separate backup processes in place for the database data, but must we assume that they’re consistent with the state of the application as it was published? This is where the benefits of stateful and application-consistent backups, restores and clones with Astra Control really show their value.

First, we can use Astra Control to facilitate post-mortem analysis on the state of the application. We do this by cloning the buggy production version to a parallel testing environment in an application-consistent manner. Having this environment set aside in its bug-ridden state enable us to troubleshoot the problem in real time.

Furthermore, Astra Control supports the in-place restore capability that allows us to restore the production application to a last acceptable backup (that preceded the afflicted version of code). The restored version assumes the position of the previous, buggy production application, in an application-consistent and stateful manner, including the ingress IP previously assigned. As a result, customers accessing the front end would be unaware of the transition to the backup version.