GCP – Google Cloud Backup and DR upgrade: VM protection made easier

We’re excited to announce a major enhancement to Google Cloud Backup and DR, making it simpler than ever to safeguard your critical Google Compute Engine virtual machines (VMs). You can now leverage the power of Google Cloud tags, including inheritance, to  easily configure backup policies for Compute Engine VMs, ensuring consistent protection of your dynamic cloud environments.

The challenge of managing VM backups

Managing backups for a large number of Compute Engine VMs can be complex, especially when VMs are frequently added, removed, or modified. Manually assigning backup policies to individual VMs is time-consuming and can be error-prone, potentially leaving vital resources unprotected.

The power of tag-based backups

With our new tag-based backup approach, you can leverage the organizational power of tags to automate the protection of your Compute Engine VMs. Here’s how it works:

Assign your tags: Apply meaningful tags to your organization, folders, projects, or directly to your VMs. These tags might reflect application names, environments (production, development, testing), or criticality levels.

Create tag-based policies: Within Google Backup and DR, you can create backup policies with your desired backup schedules, retention periods, and recovery regions. After policy creation, you can assign them to specific tags.

Automate protection: Any VM with a matching tag is automatically assigned the backup policy. New VMs inheriting those tags immediately gain protection.

Benefits of tag-based backups

Simplified management: Drastically reduce the administrative overhead of configuring VM backups at scale by updating the policy attached to the tag rather than at an individual VM backup level.

Consistent protection: Ensure new VMs with inherited tags from the project, folder, or organization are automatically protected without manual intervention.

Flexibility: Adjust your backup strategies easily by modifying tags or creating new tag-based policies, including support for tags assigned using Terraform

For example, you can easily tag all production projects with the tag backupdr-dynamicprotect:production. You could then create a backup policy that does the following:

Takes daily snapshots of VMs in those projects that inherit the backupdr-dynamicprotect:production tag

Retains backups for 30 days

Updates your Terraform script to include your new protection tag to ensure protection of every new Compute Engine instance that’s created

Getting started

Review the Google Backup and DR documentation on tag-based backups.

Develop a tagging strategy for your Compute Engine VMs.

Create backup policies that target your chosen tags.

Attend ARC205, Protect your critical workloads and recover your most critical asset – your data at Google Cloud Next.