Prerequisites for restoring the PPC deployment

Before starting a restore, ensure the following conditions are met:

• A Kubernetes cluster is created. Restore is performed as part of creating a cluster, not on an existing one. Restore is only supported during a fresh installation flow.

• An existing backup is available. Backups are taken automatically as part of the default installation using scheduled backup mechanisms. These backups are stored in an AWS S3 bucket configured during the original installation.

• Access to the original backup AWS S3 bucket. During restore, the same S3 bucket that was used during the original installation must be specified.

• Permissions to read from the S3 bucket. The user performing the restore must have sufficient permissions to access the backup data stored in the bucket.

• While the backup is taken from the source cluster, do not perform Create, Read, Update, or Delete (CRUD) operations on the source cluster. This ensures backup consistency and prevents data corruption during restore.

• Before initiating the restore, review, and update the KMS key policy to reflect the restore cluster name. Even if the policy was already configured for the source cluster, it must be updated for the new restore cluster. If the policy continues to reference the source cluster name, the IAM role created during restore cannot decrypt the backup data, causing the restore to fail.

• Ensure that the storage_class_name in iac/aws/cluster/modules/05_helm_releases/terraform.tfvars file is same for the targeted restore cluster and the source PPC cluster where the backup is created. If this value differs, the restore operation fails.

• Before restoring to a new cluster, if the source cluster is accessible, disable the backup operations on the source cluster by setting the backup storage location to read‑only. This ensures that no additional backup data is written during the restore process.

  To disable the backup operation on the source cluster, run the following command:

  kubectl patch backupstoragelocation default -n pty-backup-recovery --type merge -p '{"spec":{"accessMode":"ReadOnly"}}'
  

  If the source cluster is not accessible, this step can be skipped.

During Disaster management, the backup data is used to restore the cluster and the OpenSearch indexes using snapshots. However, Insight restores OpenSearch data only from the most recent snapshot created by the daily-insight-snapshots policy.
For more information, refer to Backing up and restoring indexes.

Warning: Do not install or manage multiple clusters from the same working directory. Each cluster deployment maintains its own Terraform or OpenTofu state, and reusing a directory can overwrite state files, causing loss of cluster tracking and unintended cleanup behavior.
Use a dedicated directory, and jump box, where possible, per cluster, and always verify the active kubectl context before running cleanup commands such as ./bootstrap.sh --cloud aws destroy.

The repository provides a bootstrap script that automatically installs or updates the following software on the jump box:

• AWS CLI - Required to communicate with your AWS account.
• bc - Required for version comparisons and resource calculations.
• cmctl - Required to validate and manage TLS certificates.
• Helm - Required to manage Kubernetes packages.
• jq - Required to parse JSON.
• kubectl - Required to communicate with the Kubernetes cluster.
• OpenTofu - Required to manage infrastructure as code.
• ORAS - Required to pull OCI artifacts such as deployment packages.
• skopeo - Required to copy container images between registries.
• ssh-keygen - Required to secure SSH access to deployment environments.

The bootstrap script also checks if you have the required permissions on AWS. It then sets up the EKS cluster and installs the microservices required for deploying the PCS on a PPC.

Note: Before running the bootstrap as the root user on RHEL, ensure that /usr/local/bin (and the AWS CLI binary path, if applicable) is included in the $PATH. Alternatively, run the script using a non-root user (such as ec2-user) where /usr/local/bin is already part of the default PATH.