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Restoring RDS

cloud.gov structured data is stored using Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS). RDS provides multiple availability zones, automated backups and snapshots allowing operators to restore the database in the event of a failure.

Customer Databases

Coordinate with the tenant to determine the point in time to restore the database from, and when the operation will take place:

  1. Shared database plans do not include backups and restores.
  2. Dedicated RDS plans include backups as described in the user documentation.
  3. The restore will result in the database being restored to a point in time.
  4. Data written after the restore point in time will be lost.

Identify RDS Hostname

Once the tenant agreed to a database restore, identify the RDS instance attached to the application:

cf target -s SPACE -o ORGANIZATION
cf env APP

The JSON contains the database identifier under the key host within the credentials map.

Restoring the Database

Refer to the RDS documentation for restoring a database.

Prior to restoring, record the configuration settings:

  1. Database publicly accessible from the internet (yes/no)
  2. Instance size (m4.large, etc.)
  3. Multi-zone (yes/no)
  4. VPC (dev, staging, etc.)
  5. Security Groups

Once the restore has finished, confirm the new instance matches the previous configuration. To update a configuration setting, click ‘Modify’ from the RDS console instance view.

Also set the master password using the Modify form. Since Terraform lacks the capability to import rds credentials, please set the password to the old password of the database we are restoring.

Platform Databases

Databases created by Terraform store credentials in the Terraform State S3 Bucket:

aws s3 cp s3://${TF_STATE_BUCKET}/cf-${ENVIRONMENT}/terraform.tfstate tmp/state.file

To retrieve the RDS instance provisioned for staging concourse:

cat tmp/sample.file | grep staging_concourse_rds_host | less

The value displayed is the database identifier. To restore the BOSH instance, grep for bosh_rds_host_curr. Database identifiers can also be found in the AWS RDS console.

Updating Terraform

Platform database configuration is stored in Terraform. After a restore, update Terraform with the new database instance using terraform init and terraform import.

For example, to update Terraform configuration for development BOSH (my-restored-db-id is the restored database identifier):

cd terraform/stacks/main
terraform init -backend=true -backend-config=encrypt=true -backend-config=bucket=terraform-state -backend-config=key=development/terraform.tfstate
terraform state rm module.stack.module.base.module.rds.aws_db_instance.rds_database
terraform import module.stack.module.base.module.rds.aws_db_instance.rds_database my-restored-db-id

Once updated, run the Plan pipeline task in Concourse. If Concourse is unavailable, run terraform plan from the command-line (using the terraform-apply.sh script from cg-pipeline-tasks repository).

Confirm the plan matches the state updates (it may list changes such as parameter groups and passwords). Apply the plan using bootstrap-* in Concourse or terraform apply on the cli and verify the output in the create-update-ENVIRONMENT job within the bootstrap pipeline.

Redeploy the respective application and verify proper operation.