Creating snapshots for backup
Often we will need to create snapshots of instances. These can be used as backup or to create more instances to scale up . Typically, a daily or weekly cron of the Ansible task would help in maintaining a periodic backup.
How to do it…
We can use the gce_snapshot module to create a snapshot:
- name: create snapshot of instance
gce_snapshot:
instance_name: app
snapshot_name: app-snapshot
state: present
service_account_email: "{{ service_account_email }}"
project_id: "{{ project_id }}"
credentials_file: "{{ credentials_file }}"
tags:
- recipe4How it works...
In this case, we just need to specify the instance name and the snapshot name. When running this as a cron, we can set the snapshot name to the current date to maintain periodic backup. One thing to note here is that snapshots are incremental. So they consume very little space and thus, save significant cost on storage.
