Backup and restore between two minikube clusters

[owenthereal]

Describe the problem/challenge you have

I'm looking for a solution to backup a minikube cluster and restore it in CI to speed up its builds. I hope that there is a way to backup a running minikube cluster with k8s software that I install to it. The backup is then restored in CI to avoid reinstalling all the basic software every time. This would immensely shorten the CI build time.

I was pointed to velero but I'm unclear whether I would be able to use velero for this use case and there is no documentation on the minikube support.

Ref: kubernetes/minikube#9991

Describe the solution you'd like

There is documentation on velero's minikube integration, if it supports the mentioned minikube use case.

Anything else you would like to add:

N/A

Environment:

• Velero version (use velero version):
• Kubernetes version (use kubectl version):
• Kubernetes installer & version:
• Cloud provider or hardware configuration:
• OS (e.g. from /etc/os-release):

N/A

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[zubron]

Hi @owenthereal. Looking at the issue you referenced, it seems that your concern is that Velero is cloud provider specific. Velero can be run in any Kubernetes cluster v1.10 or later (see https://velero.io/docs/v1.5/basic-install/#prerequisites) but it does require access to object storage to store the the backups and associated artifacts and this is where the provider specific element comes in.

In your case, you could run Velero in your minikube clusters to backup and restore the workloads, but you would need an external object storage to store those backups. Velero supports a number of object storage providers (https://velero.io/docs/v1.5/supported-providers/), so you could use any of those but it does not require you to also run your cluster with those providers. You could use minikube for the clusters, but store your backups in AWS S3 for example.

Hopefully this answers your question. I'm going to close this issue but please feel free to reopen if you need further assistance.