One of the main focus of this year for me as a cloud architect at Veeam, is to learn as much as possible about public cloud technologies, and how our software solutions can interact with them. I started a few weeks ago to deep dive into our solutions for Amazon Web Services, using N2WS Backup & Recovery. One of the things I’ve learned is how to create a dedicated account to protect other accounts.
Lately, I took the decision to do not have anymore a physical lab, even if it was already hosted and managed at a service provider, but to completely nest it inside a vCloud Director tenancy. But while I was planning the rebuild operation, I also decided it was time to make its creation process as automated as possible, and while doing so, I learned a bit about how to use Terraform.
A couple of weeks ago I presented to a customer Veeam's integration with AWS services, specifically the Direct Restore to EC2 feature. He was really interested, but he also immediately thought about possible large scenarios of this feature. This solution is not a Disaster Recovery technology, since a machine is not replicated into EC2, ready to be powered on, but it's rather a backup that is uploaded and then imported into EC2. But still, massive migrations or the creation of dev/test environments from a production copy were really nice use cases.
Veeam Cloud Connect allows service providers to charge their costumers on the base of multiple parameters, but together with used space license consumption is surely one of the most common. This script allows service providers to configure an automatic usage reporting.
I wrote already two articles about this topic. I know that managing SSL certificates can be a cumbersome task, so any option to automate the process is a great addition to any IT administrator toolbox. This is why Let’s Encrypt certificates are becoming so popular, not just because they are free but also because the automated platform that they use allow for some amazing automation solutions. In my first article Use Let’s Encrypt free certificates in Windows for Veeam Cloud Connect I explained the basics of Let’s Encrypt technology, and how to use its certificates on a Windows machine using ACMEsharp libraries with Powershell. Then, in the second article Improved Powershell script for Let’s Encrypt certificate renewals I optimized the script even more. But still, there was room for improvement and even more automation.
More than two years ago, when we released Veeam Cloud Connect 9.0, I massively reworked my original paper on the topic, and the final result became a book available as a pdf. The book was also printed and I have some copies at home; not something to win any nobel price, but it's nice to see them there as remind me of the massive work it took. Then, the cloud was calling, and I decided it was time to make it more modern and after some re-editing and learning how markdown and github work, the book became an online resource that people can freely and easily read.
In chapter 3 of this blog series, I showed you how to connect a vCloud Director to Veeam Backup & Replication. Before Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 4, the main usage of vCloud Director was to make backups of vCloud VMs. But now with Update 4, we can use vCloud Director as a target for Cloud Connect replicas.
In the first three posts of this series I've showed you how to automate the building of a Veeam Cloud Connect environment. Now that the environment is ready, today we'll automate also the onboarding of new customers.