S3 Plugin: Scope

Enterprise

Bacula Enterprise Only

This solution is only available for Bacula Enterprise. For subscription inquiries, please reach out to sales@baculasystems.com.

The S3 Plugin is applicable in environments using any S3 endpoint.

This document presents solutions for Bacula Enterprise version 16.0 and up. It is not applicable to prior versions.

Requirements

The Bacula S3 Plugin supports AWS S3 endpoints as well as generic S3 endpoints. To be able to access S3 buckets, an authorized user with enough permissions for reading (also writing if you need to restore to an S3 bucket). This user then needs to be associated to access keys which the plugin will use to connect. More information about how to handle your access keys on AWS is available here:

Currently the S3 Plugin must be installed on a Linux-based Operating System (OS) such as RedHat Linux, Debian, Ubuntu, Suse Linux Enterprise Server, etc where a Bacula Enterprise File Daemon (FD) is installed.

Bacula Systems may address support for running this plugin on a Windows platform in a future version.

The system where the Bacula File Daemon and the plugin will run must have Java version 1.8 or above installed.

Memory and CPU requirements completely depend on the usage of this plugin (concurrency, environment size, etc). However, it is expected to have a minimum of 4GB RAM in the server where the File Daemon is running. By default, every job could end up using up to 512Mb of RAM in demanding scenarios (usually it will be less). However, there can be particular situations where this could be higher. This memory limit can be adjusted internally (see Out of Memory).

S3 APIs General Disclaimer

This plugin relies on standard S3 APIs for generic operations and in AWS S3 API in particular for specific AWS S3 services such us Storage Tiers or ACLs.

These types of Cloud or Provider APIs are owned by the provider and they could change or evolve at any time. This situation is significantly different from traditional on-premises software where each update is clearly numbered and controlled for a given server, so applications consuming that software, can clearly state what is offered and what are the target supported versions.

Amazon and anyone providing S3 APIs is usually committed to try to not break any existing functionality that could affect external applications. However, this situation can actually happen and therefore cause some occasional problems with this plugin. Bacula Systems tries to mitigate this issue with an advanced automatic monitoring system which is always checking the correct behavior of existing features, and will react quickly to that hypothetical event, but please be aware of the nature and implications of these types of cloud technologies.

Cloud Costs

As you will already know, storing data in the cloud will create additional costs. Please see the below information for the different cloud providers.

Data transfer needs to be considered as well. While upload of data is typically free or very low cost, the download is typically not free, and you will be charged per operation and per amount of data transferred.

Amazon has a pricing model for each of its storage tiers. Additionally, the costs will vary with the region you use. More information may be found here:

See also

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