Take instant snapshots to guard against errors and corruption on Compute Engine workloads.
Consider yourself an application administrator updating a program within a scheduled maintenance window of one hour, and all of a sudden the update fails. This is the time to start your rollback processes. Recovering from routine snapshots is the standard procedure for rolling back; the duration of this process varies based on the amount of data that needs to be restored and can take several minutes. Alternatively, you may try to restore from a costly-to-maintain pre-upgrade replica of the program.
What if you had a disk-size-independent, incredibly quick, and affordable recovery solution that would let you take use of the whole maintenance window and provide a predictable rollback time?
Google is pleased to present instant snapshots for Compute Engine, which offer high-frequency, nearly immediate point-in-time checks of a disk that can be quickly restored as necessary.
Recovery time objective (RTO) in the tens of seconds and recovery point objective (RPO) of seconds are provided via instant snapshots. The only hyperscaler that provides high-performance checkpointing that enables instant recovery is Google Cloud. While competing hyperscalers may require tens of minutes or even hours for the workload to recover to full performance, your Compute Engine workload operates at full disk performance as soon as an instant snapshot is restored.
Compute Engine instant snapshots allow you to recover in cases when the data needs to be rolled back to an earlier state but the fundamental infrastructure is still intact. Typical usage cases include of:
- Facilitating quick recovery from file system corruption, application software errors, and user mistake.
- Backup verification routines that take regular snapshots and instantly restore them in order to perform data consistency checks, like those for database workloads.
- Creating restore points prior to an application update allows for a quick rollback in case the scheduled maintenance doesn’t go as expected.
Apart from the aforementioned, employing immediate snapshots can also:
- Boost developer productivity: Unintentional mistakes and build failures lengthen the time needed to finish tasks in fast development cycles with lengthy build times or complex code. You can benefit from quick restores using instant snapshots instead of relying on off-site backups.
- Check the status before retreating: Make sure the backups you make are in the appropriate state and useable. Before starting a long-term backup, use quick snapshots to checkpoint and clone drives to validate on secondary machines.
- Boost the frequency of backups: You can take regular backups of business-critical, high-volume databases that can’t afford long backup windows by using immediate snapshots.
Important aspects of instant snapshots
Compared to conventional snapshots, Compute Engine Instant snapshots have several advantages.
- Backups that are made in-place: Instant snapshots are made on regional or zonal drives, and they are stored in the same location as the media type and source disk. This indicates that an immediate snapshot taken from an SDD (or HDD) disk shall be kept on the same disk. Instant snapshots have a fixed creation fee and additional storage costs are billed based on usage.
- Quick and incremental: Only modified, incremental data blocks since the last instant snapshot are stored in each instant snapshot, which are prepared in a matter of seconds. Compared to backup snapshots, you can take snapshots far more frequently thanks to its high-frequency snapshotting capability.
- Quick disk restore: Every instant snapshot can be quickly restored in a matter of seconds to a new disk. These new disks take on the disk type of the snapshot because they are in the same zone.
- Convertible to backup or archive: For long-term, geo-redundant storage, you can migrate instant snapshots to a separate point of presence.
The operation of instant snapshots
Instant snapshots can be made in a matter of seconds since they only store the data that has changed since the initial checkpoint.
Thus, in the example above, instant snapshots generates a checkpoint at the time of creation, but they don’t actively store data until the disk’s third block is overwritten with fresh information. Keep in mind that adding data like Google Cloud doing here by writing to blocks 6 and 7 doesn’t necessitate using more storage on the checkpoint.
This results in both efficient performance and extremely high storage efficiency: As previously indicated, producing and restoring from an instant snapshot can be completed in a matter of seconds and has no effect on the underlying disk’s performance.
You can easily and effectively safeguard your workloads by integrating instant snapshots into your routine change-management and maintenance processes, thanks to their storage, performance, and cost-effectiveness.
Comparing different sorts of snapshots
An overview of the various performance attributes of instant snapshots in comparison to backup standard snapshots is provided here.
An illustration of a use case
Maya, an administrator of applications, must update programs stored on persistent disk drives. She is allotted one hour to complete this maintenance window. If the volumes have the new software at the end of the window, it will be considered a successful upgrade; if not, it will be considered a rollback, and they will be in the exact same state as they were right before the maintenance window began.
Examine Maya’s process for taking instantaneous versus frequent snapshots:
Make use of it now
Instant snapshots provide high-frequency backup and nearly instantaneous on-device point-in-time backups for quick restorations. They facilitate quick restores in the event of unsuccessful upgrades or user mistake, shorten the time needed for off-site backup, and improve program upgrade windows.
