vCluster v0.24 - Snapshot & Restore and Sleep Mode Improvements

I’m excited to present the updates coming with vCluster v0.24. In this post, we will cover Snapshots and Sleep Mode Improvements. Along with this post, we have a couple of videos that will demo both features.

Snapshots

Let’s start by talking about Snapshots. While you were always able to back up your virtual clusters with Valero, we’ve made it a little bit easier and included more features. Now, you can back up your vCluster with the vcluster snapshot command using the vCluster CLI.

What does it include?

• Includes etcd database content, helm release, and vcluster.yaml configuration

What are some of the interesting use cases this can cover?

• Snapshot
  • More room to test but still rollback
  • If you make a mistake, it’s ok, roll it back
  • ROLL IT BACK
• Restore
  • Restore from a previously good state
  • Create a new virtual cluster somewhere else (a different cluster) off of the restore
  • Share your backup so someone else can check it out
  • Template out basic installs
• Migration
  • Installed on the wrong host cluster, that’s fine, back it up and restore it on another one
  • Need to delete your virtual cluster to free up resources, but want to use it again in the future, back it up
  • Migrate from K3s to K8s
• Cloning and Testing
  • Try new things, install new CRDs, and if they don’t work, restore from a previous snapshot
  • Run your same configuration in multiple locations by backing up and creating a new virtual cluster in another host cluster
  • Share your vCluster with others

There’s probably a bunch of uses that I can’t even imagine, that’s where you come in. If you figure out something cool and want to share it with us, join Slack, post it in the vCluster channel or reach out to me!

Demo Video

Implementation Details

• Snapshots are stored as a compressed archive (tar.gz) and can be pushed to local files, S3, or OCI registries
• A task pod executes snapshot and restore operations to isolate these actions from the control plane
• Snapshots only capture etcd/kine data—vCluster configurations and persistent volumes are not included (yet)

Sleep Mode

Sleep Mode has been moved out of experimental. It’s still for pre-production use cases, which means you probably don’t want to treat it like Knative, or at least not yet.

It’s a lot easier to exempt certain types of activities from waking your cluster. New annotations help fine-tune what wakes the cluster up and what doesn’t. Now, you can ignore Argo CD, K9s, or kubectl get deployments.

When you update from v0.23 to v0.24 there’s a helpful message letting you know how to configure sleep mode now that it is no longer experimental.

Keep an eye on our YouTube channel for demos showing off new features, helpful guides for getting started, and day 1-100 operations.

Next Steps

Head over to the changelog to get more information about this post. While you are there, sign up for updates to keep up to date with new releases. Join our slack, it’s over there on the left somewhere in the navigation. Obviously follow all of our other socials to keep up with what’s new at LoftLabs, vCluster, DevPod, and all of the other projects we’ve created that you’ve come to love.