Why protecting OpenStack matters
OpenStack projects often hold many servers and volumes created by different teams and automation, spread across several regions. The cloud runs them, but it does not keep track of what is protected or keep a copy of them outside itself.
- Resources spread across regions: servers and volumes created in different regions and by different tools are hard to keep track of, and harder to know are protected.
- Snapshots stay in the cloud: Cinder snapshots and Glance images are stored in the same cloud and project as the data they copy, so they are lost along with it.
- No independent recovery path: without a copy stored outside the cloud, there is nothing to restore from if a server or volume is lost, corrupted or deliberately destroyed.
Security and Compromise
Access to an OpenStack project is controlled by the credentials and roles granted in Keystone. If a credential leaks or its roles are too broad:
- Project-wide impact: an attacker with access to the project can affect every server and volume in it, in every region the credential reaches.
- Data loss at the resource level: servers and volumes can be deleted, encrypted or exfiltrated together with their snapshots.
- No recovery without a backup: without a backup stored independently of the cloud, there is no way to undo the damage, only to rebuild from scratch.
Plakar mitigates this by keeping OpenStack backups encrypted end-to-end and stored outside the cloud, so a compromised project does not put its own backup history at risk.
How Plakar protects your OpenStack environment
Plakar integrates with OpenStack in three ways:
- Inventory: connect to an OpenStack project and discover its Nova servers, Cinder volumes, Glance images, Swift containers and Trove databases in every region the credential can reach.
- Source connector: capture a Nova server with its root disk and attached volumes, or a single Cinder volume, and store it in an encrypted, deduplicated Kloset, independent of the cloud it runs in.
- Destination connector: restore a server or a volume to the same project or another one. Disks come back as new Cinder volumes, either attached to an existing server, to a new server, or left detached.
Instead of relying on copies kept inside the cloud, Plakar gives you an independent, verifiable and encrypted backup history for the OpenStack infrastructure your business runs on.
