aster.cloud aster.cloud
  • /
  • Platforms
    • Public Cloud
    • On-Premise
    • Hybrid Cloud
    • Data
  • Architecture
    • Design
    • Solutions
    • Enterprise
  • Engineering
    • Automation
    • Software Engineering
    • Project Management
    • DevOps
  • Programming
    • Learning
  • Tools
  • About
  • /
  • Platforms
    • Public Cloud
    • On-Premise
    • Hybrid Cloud
    • Data
  • Architecture
    • Design
    • Solutions
    • Enterprise
  • Engineering
    • Automation
    • Software Engineering
    • Project Management
    • DevOps
  • Programming
    • Learning
  • Tools
  • About
aster.cloud aster.cloud
  • /
  • Platforms
    • Public Cloud
    • On-Premise
    • Hybrid Cloud
    • Data
  • Architecture
    • Design
    • Solutions
    • Enterprise
  • Engineering
    • Automation
    • Software Engineering
    • Project Management
    • DevOps
  • Programming
    • Learning
  • Tools
  • About
  • Programming
  • Public Cloud

Disaster Recovery Simplified With Cloud Spanner CPU Optimized Backups

  • aster.cloud
  • March 23, 2022
  • 4 minute read

For business critical applications, a disaster recovery and data protection plan is essential. This plan should protect against both natural disasters (fires, floods, power outages, etc) as well as human caused incidents, like shipping a bug that causes bad data to be committed.

As part of the plan, application owners should consider both RPO (Recovery Point Objective), which relates to the age of the data one is prepared to recover from; and RTO (Recovery Time Objective), which relates to the amount of time one is prepared to take while bringing an application back online following an incident.


Partner with aster.cloud
for your next big idea.
Let us know here.



From our partners:

CITI.IO :: Business. Institutions. Society. Global Political Economy.
CYBERPOGO.COM :: For the Arts, Sciences, and Technology.
DADAHACKS.COM :: Parenting For The Rest Of Us.
ZEDISTA.COM :: Entertainment. Sports. Culture. Escape.
TAKUMAKU.COM :: For The Hearth And Home.
ASTER.CLOUD :: From The Cloud And Beyond.
LIWAIWAI.COM :: Intelligence, Inside and Outside.
GLOBALCLOUDPLATFORMS.COM :: For The World's Computing Needs.
FIREGULAMAN.COM :: For The Fire In The Belly Of The Coder.
ASTERCASTER.COM :: Supra Astra. Beyond The Stars.
BARTDAY.COM :: Prosperity For Everyone.

1 Disaster recovery.jpg

Cloud Spanner is a fully managed relational database with unlimited scale, strong consistency, and up to 99.999% availability. Cloud Spanner provides transparent, synchronous replication across zones with regional configurations, and across regions with multi-region configurations. This architecture inherently protects against some causes of incidents that traditional disaster recovery solutions must address – natural disasters and individual machine failures.

Regardless of the high availability that Cloud Spanner offers, application owners still need data protection — one can never rule out the possibility of a user error or application bug which could cause incorrect values to be stored into the database.  To address these needs, Cloud Spanner offers backup/restore and point-in-time recovery.

Cloud Spanner backups are transactionally consistent: when a backup is created, the backup captures the exact database contents as of a backup timestamp — a microsecond granularity transaction commit timestamp. Cloud Spanner ensures that all data associated with transactions that are committed up to and including the backup timestamp are included in the backup, and that all partial updates associated with uncommitted transactions are excluded.  Point-in-time recovery allows recovering from a user-chosen restore timestamp with the same semantics as a backup – all transactions committed up to and including the restore timestamp are present in the restored database, and nothing else.

Read More  Getting Started With VMware Tanzu Community Edition

Suppose a user has a 10TB database that is powering a business-critical application. The user regularly takes backups as part of their disaster recovery plan.  In many systems, backing up a large database can take many hours and can increase the CPU load on the database. There is a concern that increased CPU load from backups could adversely impact production traffic. Cloud Spanner has solved this problem with CPU Optimized Backups. With this feature, Cloud Spanner has separated the CPU resources used for customer database instances from the CPU resources used for backup creation. It is enabled for all backups in Cloud Spanner.

To create a backup for a database, Cloud Spanner starts up a batch job to read the database contents and write out a copy of the backup.  This is done in each GCP zone that has a full copy of the database – all read-write and all read-only zones.  Each zone’s copy of the backup is independently written and stays only within that zone.  This enables high availability backups and fast restores without cross-zone network traffic.

Compute and storage have always been separated in Spanner.  However, before the advent of CPU Optimized Backups, each backup job obtained the data by requesting it from Cloud Spanner servers in the customer instance; the logic in the servers plays a critical role in determining the correct data to include in the backup.  This diagram depicts the flow of data without CPU optimized backups:

2 Disaster recovery.jpg

In the above scheme, the storage systems and the backup batch jobs are all highly scalable.  The limiting factor is the throughput of copying the data through the customer instance servers. The logic in the Cloud Spanner servers does play an important role here: separating out older data which must be captured in the backup from newer data that must be excluded.  Examples of newer data are partial updates from aborted transactions, and updates from transactions that committed only after the backup timestamp.

Read More  Anthos Config Management: Enforcing The CIS Benchmark With Policy Controller

With CPU optimized backups, we run the formerly server-side logic as part of backup worker batch jobs. This allows us to perform the detailed processing of separating out data that must be captured in the backup vs data that must be excluded — but without having the customer instance servers do the work.  Instead, the work is done entirely inside the backup worker batch job:

3 Disaster recovery.jpg

This has several important advantages for customers:

  1. Customers no longer need to provision extra compute capacity (as measured in nodes or processing units) to leave CPU headroom available for backups.
  2. CPU load on the customer instance due to backups is reduced nearly to zero – which means no performance impact to production workloads while backups run.
  3. The batch job creating the backup can be scaled independently of the number of servers in the customer instance.  The underlying filesystem is highly distributed and allows for essentially unlimited read bandwidth — in practice, limited by the number of client workers in the batch job.  With CPU optimized backups, we decouple the size of the backup jobs from the size of the customer instances, and allow backups for large databases to burst up to very large sizes (potentially, thousands of machines).

Backup performance depends on a variety of factors, including some database-specific factors like schema details, so we don’t make very specific performance predictions.  That said, we’ve found that most databases’ backups including databases in the tens to hundreds of terabytes typically complete within one to two hours.

CPU Optimized Backups continue the tradition of technical innovation in Cloud Spanner data protection and disaster recovery.  Existing restore functionality leverages per-zone backups to enable fast restores with no cross-zone data copying.  Point-in-time-recovery enables flexible restores either using stale reads, backups at past timestamps, or export at past timestamps. We continue to innovate and improve Cloud Spanner capabilities to serve customers better. Cloud Spanner is incurring extra costs with the implementation of CPU Optimized Backups, but in the interest of providing customers a better experience at the same price Google is happy to shoulder the cost. There is no change in backups pricing with CPU Optimized Backups.

Read More  How To Install pygame (Python OpenSource Project)

For more information on Cloud Spanner, watch this youtube video or visit the Cloud Spanner website.

 

 

By Gideon Glass Software Engineer
Source Google Cloud


For enquiries, product placements, sponsorships, and collaborations, connect with us at [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you!

Our humans need coffee too! Your support is highly appreciated, thank you!

aster.cloud

Related Topics
  • Cloud Spanner
  • GCP
  • Google Cloud
You May Also Like
View Post
  • Computing
  • Public Cloud
  • Technology

United States Army Enterprise Cloud Management Agency Expands its Oracle Defense Cloud Services

  • April 15, 2025
DeepSeek R1 is now available on Azure AI Foundry and GitHub
View Post
  • Public Cloud
  • Technology

DeepSeek R1 is now available on Azure AI Foundry and GitHub

  • February 2, 2025
Cloud platforms among the clouds
View Post
  • Computing
  • Learning
  • Public Cloud

Best Cloud Platforms Offering Free Trials for Cloud Mastery

  • December 23, 2024
Vehicle Manufacturing
View Post
  • Hybrid Cloud
  • Public Cloud

Toyota shifts into overdrive: Developing an AI platform for enhanced manufacturing efficiency

  • December 10, 2024
IBM and AWS
View Post
  • Public Cloud

IBM and AWS Accelerate Partnership to Scale Responsible Generative AI

  • December 2, 2024
COP29 AI and Climate Change
View Post
  • Public Cloud
  • Technology

How Cloud And AI Are Bringing Scale To Corporate Climate Mitigation And Adaptation

  • November 18, 2024
Cloud Workstations
View Post
  • Public Cloud

FEDRAMP High Development in the Cloud: Code with Cloud Workstations

  • November 8, 2024
View Post
  • Public Cloud

PyTorch/XLA 2.5: vLLM support and an improved developer experience

  • October 31, 2024

Stay Connected!
LATEST
  • 1
    The Summer Adventures : Hiking and Nature Walks Essentials
    • June 2, 2025
  • 2
    Just make it scale: An Aurora DSQL story
    • May 29, 2025
  • 3
    Reliance on US tech providers is making IT leaders skittish
    • May 28, 2025
  • Examine the 4 types of edge computing, with examples
    • May 28, 2025
  • AI and private cloud: 2 lessons from Dell Tech World 2025
    • May 28, 2025
  • 6
    TD Synnex named as UK distributor for Cohesity
    • May 28, 2025
  • Weigh these 6 enterprise advantages of storage as a service
    • May 28, 2025
  • 8
    Broadcom’s ‘harsh’ VMware contracts are costing customers up to 1,500% more
    • May 28, 2025
  • 9
    Pulsant targets partner diversity with new IaaS solution
    • May 23, 2025
  • 10
    Growing AI workloads are causing hybrid cloud headaches
    • May 23, 2025
about
Hello World!

We are aster.cloud. We’re created by programmers for programmers.

Our site aims to provide guides, programming tips, reviews, and interesting materials for tech people and those who want to learn in general.

We would like to hear from you.

If you have any feedback, enquiries, or sponsorship request, kindly reach out to us at:

[email protected]
Most Popular
  • Understand how Windows Server 2025 PAYG licensing works
    • May 20, 2025
  • By the numbers: How upskilling fills the IT skills gap
    • May 21, 2025
  • 3
    Cloud adoption isn’t all it’s cut out to be as enterprises report growing dissatisfaction
    • May 15, 2025
  • 4
    Hybrid cloud is complicated – Red Hat’s new AI assistant wants to solve that
    • May 20, 2025
  • 5
    Google is getting serious on cloud sovereignty
    • May 22, 2025
  • /
  • Technology
  • Tools
  • About
  • Contact Us

Input your search keywords and press Enter.