One of the most critical tasks for a system administrator or cloud operator is to plan a backup. Building an infrastructure and starting in production without a disaster recovery background is considered highly risky and you will need to start taking immediate action. We may find a bunch of property software in the cloud computing area that does the job, such as the VMware backup solution.
However, backing up open source clouds will not be that easy. OpenStack does not, for instance, support any special tool for backup. As it is merely a collection of components combined to deliver services, an OpenStack operator should think how to map the components used in its infrastructure and prepare a backup strategy for each; the strategy should be easy, efficient, and auto-recovery enabled.
Thus, you should not miss the first question: what do we need to back up and how do we perform such a...