Serverless Application Discovery Tracking for Point-in-Time Backup
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Solution Overview
Problem
Traditional data storage management systems struggle to effectively protect serverless applications with distributed architectures, particularly in cloud environments, as they fail to provide integrated, point-in-time views of application assets and often result in asynchronous and disassociated copies, making reliable restoration and migration difficult.
Innovation Solution
A holistic data storage management system that deploys a discovery tracker to identify and manage serverless applications within cloud service accounts, creating an application entity for coordinated protection and migration across single-cloud, multi-cloud, and non-cloud environments, using an orchestration function to ensure synchronized storage operations and asset mapping.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If traditional data storage management systems are used to protect serverless applications, then the system structure is simple, but the system fails to provide integrated point-in-time views and produces asynchronous disassociated copies
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a discovery tracker as an intermediary component deployed within the cloud service account to detect and report serverless application deployments. This tracker acts as a mediator between the cloud environment and the data storage management system, enabling the system to obtain accurate information about application assets and their relationships without directly complex interactions with the cloud provider's infrastructure.
Solution Approach 2:
The system segments the data protection function into multiple specialized components: a discovery tracker for detecting applications, an asset mapping module for organizing relationships, and a coordinated backup system for creating synchronized copies. This segmentation allows each component to handle specific aspects of the complex task, improving overall reliability while managing complexity through modular design.
2Reliability
If the data storage management system monitors all cloud deployments continuously, then the data protection is reliable and up-to-date, but the computational resources and costs increase
Solution Approach 1:
The discovery tracker operates periodically rather than continuously, scheduling regular detection cycles to identify serverless applications and report changes to the data storage management system. This periodic operation maintains data protection reliability by ensuring the system is updated with current deployment information while significantly reducing computational resource consumption compared to continuous monitoring.
Solution Approach 2:
The discovery tracker is deployed within the customer's cloud service account, allowing it to autonomously detect and report application deployments without requiring external intervention or continuous resource allocation from the data storage management system. The tracker self-manages the detection process and communicates findings back to the system, reducing overall computational overhead.
3Reliability
If the system creates separate backup copies for each application asset, then the data protection is comprehensive, but the storage costs and management complexity increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system merges backup operations for multiple application assets into coordinated backup jobs. By using asset mapping to identify relationships between applications and their underlying assets, the system can combine redundant backup operations and create integrated point-in-time copies that protect entire application ecosystems rather than individual assets in isolation, reducing overall storage consumption while maintaining comprehensive protection.
Solution Approach 2:
The coordinated backup system creates universal backup copies that serve multiple applications simultaneously. Instead of creating separate dedicated backups for each asset, the system generates multi-functional copies that can restore entire application portfolios, reducing the total quantity of backup data required while ensuring complete data protection coverage.
Data Source
AI summary
A holistic approach protects serverless applications in various cloud and/or non-cloud data center computing environments. An illustrative data storage management system deploys, or causes to be deployed, a discovery tracker function in a customer's cloud service account. The discovery tracker identifies and tracks what applications are executing therein, whether they are already known to the illustrative system or not. This aspect ensures that the system is up-to-date with a customer's cloud deployments, so that it may timely back up active applications, and conversely, so that it may dispose properly of copies of applications that are no longer deployed. The discovery tracker discovers application assets, relationships, and interoperability dependencies. The illustrative system creates a corresponding “application entity” that references the various assets. An orchestration function coordinates storage management operations to generate a set of copies of the application's discovered assets. The set of copies forms a point-in-time copy of the application.