Terraform: Why it’s not a backup solution

Generic requirements of a backup solution

Here are the typical requirements one would expect from a backup solution:

• Data Integrity and Reliability: The backup solution should ensure the integrity and consistency of backed-up data. It should have mechanisms to verify the integrity of backed-up data through checksums or other validation methods.

• Data Encryption: Data stored in backups should be encrypted both during transit and at rest to protect sensitive information.

• Backup Types: The solution should support various backup types such as full backups, incremental backups, and differential backups to optimize storage space and backup time.

• Retention Policies: The ability to define and manage retention policies to determine how long backups are retained before they are automatically purged.

• Point-in-Time Recovery: Support for restoring data to specific points in time, allowing you to recover from data corruption or other issues without losing too much data.

• Granularity: The ability to restore individual files, folders, or specific database records rather than requiring a full system restore.

• Backup Scheduling: Flexible scheduling options for automated backups, including the ability to set regular intervals, custom schedules, and real-time backups.

• Performance Impact: Minimized performance impact during backup processes to ensure production systems remain responsive.

• Notification and Monitoring: Alerting and monitoring capabilities to notify administrators of backup successes, failures, or issues.

• Scalability: The solution should scale to accommodate growing data volumes and expanding infrastructure.

• Platform Compatibility: Supports data backup from various Okta versions.

• Recovery Speed: Quick and efficient data recovery processes to minimize downtime in case of data loss.

• Testing and Validation: The ability to test backups and validate their recoverability without affecting production systems.

• Reporting: Detailed reports on backup activities, success rates, and any issues encountered during the backup process.

• User-Friendly Interface: An intuitive and user-friendly interface for configuring, monitoring, and managing backup processes.

• Support and Documentation: Adequate support channels and documentation to assist with setup, troubleshooting, and maintenance.

Terraform vs Backupta

Let's see how Terraform matches these requirements compared to Backupta :

Another important aspect is the implementation time. If you decide to use Terraform to manage your Okta tenant, you will need to manage every single resource with it, which could mean a lot of code to produce if you’re starting from an existing tenant. With Backupta, no code needed!

Conclusion

Well, we’re not keeping score, but we do hope you got the point: don’t use Terraform as a backup solution (and use Backupta instead :) )

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