How can velero backup trigger CloudNativePG backup?

[retrogaming457]

Sometimes we need to backup an application as well as it's backend database at the same time. For example, for a application using postgres as its backend, I want to backup application's namespace using velero and postgres database using backup facilities of postgres itself (e.g. CloudNativePG operator) - not velero.

I understand that both Velero and CloudNativePG have cronjob and we can set them both for the same time to occur. But this is somehow repeating approach which we normally want to avoid. So my question is:

How can we trigger CloundNativePG backup when velero starts backing up state of the application?

[sseago]

You might be able to do this by executing the CloudNativePG backup in a backup hook for the postgres pod:
https://velero.io/docs/v1.13/backup-hooks/

[djeinstine]

Hi @retrogaming457 , did you figure something out in the end?

I understand I could simply trigger the barman-cloud-backup using hooks. However, what about restore? I haven't seen a reasonable way to do it. According to cloudnativepg, you need to add externalClusters to the spec to a fresh pg cluster. However, as I understand it, velero would simply apply the pg cluster spec as it was stored on k8s.

Is it really as simple as triggering a barman-cloud-wal-restore on a velero restore hook?