Cassandra restore overview

This page provides an overview of restoring Cassandra in Apigee hybrid.

Why use restore?

You can use backups to restore Apigee infrastructure from the ground up in the event of catastrophic failures, such as irrecoverable data loss in your Apigee hybrid instance from a disaster. Restoration takes your data from the backup location and restores the data into a new Cassandra cluster with the same number of nodes. No cluster data is taken from the old Cassandra cluster. The goal of the restoration process is to bring an Apigee hybrid installation back to a previously operational state using backup data from a snapshot.

The use of backups to restore is not recommended for the following scenarios:

  • Cassandra node failures.
  • Accidental deletion of data like apps, developers, and api_credentials.
  • One or more regions going down in a multi-region hybrid deployment.

Apigee Cassandra deployments and operational architecture take care of redundancy and fault tolerance for a single region. In most cases, the recommended multi-region production implementation of hybrid means that a region failure can be recovered from another live region using region decommissioning and expansion procedures instead of restoring from a backup.

Before you begin implementing a restore from a Cassandra backup, be aware of the following:

  • Downtime: There will be downtime for the duration of the restoration.
  • Data loss: There will be data loss between the last valid backup and the time the restoration is complete.
  • Restoration time: Restoration time depends on the size of the data and cluster.
  • Cherry-picking data: You cannot select only specific data to restore. Restoration restores the entire backup you select.

How to restore?

Cassandra's restoration steps differ slightly depending on whether your Apigee hybrid is deployed in a single region or multiple regions. For the detailed restoration steps, see the following documentation: