BackUpScale Milestones: August–September 2024 Highlights

Project Status Update

It’s been a busy six months here at BackupScale—time flies when you’re building the future of secure, reliable backups! Below is a quick look at the progress we’ve made since August, as well as a glimpse into our final major to-do before launch.

What We’ve Accomplished

Moved to a New Cloud Provider

• Selection & Migration: We evaluated multiple options and chose the best-fit cloud provider for our needs.
• Cloud-Native Conversion: Our services now run 100% on Kubernetes, giving us highly scalable and highly available infrastructure.
• Load-Balanced SSH Access: We introduced load-balancing for SSH connections, which provides resiliency in service access.
• Network Security: We implemented a secure virtual private network (VPN) to protect all non-public assets.
• Enhanced DevOps: Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines now keep development efficient with no more manual deployments, allowing us to focus on building a better product.
• Automated Infrastructure & Pipelines: We codified everything with infrastructure as code (IaC) to ensure consistency and repeatability. This code, along with our container images, are security scanned on every code change.
• Cluster Monitoring: We deployed industry standard event monitoring and alerting for out entire stack, so we have full visibility and real-time metrics on service health.

Fully Operationalized User Management

• Runbook Automation: We finalized our code for gathering data, user creation, updates, and deletion with no more manual operations.
• Centralized Authentication: Users now authenticate through LDAP, which simplifies logins across the network.
• Logging & Traceability: We’re leveraging a state-of-the-art task engine controller to better track and automate these operations with full logging for traceability, to help us find problems right away.
• Improved Cloud Storage Integration: Our new object storage provider will now store your data redundantly across multiple drives, in multiple servers, and in multiple locations in their data centre.

Added New Features for Launch

• Multiple Repositories: Users can now manage more than one repository, perfect for segregating backups by project or department.
• New Web-Based Front-End: We replaced our terminal-based manager with a browser-based tool, making it much easier to configure and run client-side backups from your devices.
• Default Data Compression: Compression is now enabled by default, helping reduce storage costs and speed up transfers.
• Append-Only Mode Management: Users can temporarily disable and re-enable append-only mode from outside their client devices for their maintenance windows.

What’s Left to Do

While we’ve made huge strides, our final major milestone is to develop a comprehensive dashboard site, which will allow you to:

• Sign up for subscription plans and manage your account.
• Monitor backup logs and review historical data.
• Temporarily disable append-only mode, and then receive an e-mail reminding you to turn it back on after pruning your repositories.

We’re excited to share more in the coming months. Here’s what we have planned for future updates:

• Our new status page with uptime tracking,
• Our new user-friendly backup manager for your devices, and also
• The new dashboard!

We’ll keep you updated on our progress—and thanks for following along on our journey to make backups secure, easy, and scalable for everyone!

As always, if you have questions or feedback, feel free to reach out. We appreciate your support and can’t wait to bring you the next chapter of BackupScale.