Use Cloud Storage for Bulk Operations

The AUTH parameter passed to the file URL must be set to either specified or implicit. The following sections describe how to set up each authentication method.

Specified authentication

If the AUTH parameter is not provided, AWS connections default to specified and the access keys must be provided in the URI parameters.

As an example:

BACKUP DATABASE <database> INTO 's3://{bucket name}/{path in bucket}/?AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID={access key ID}&AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY={secret access key}';

Implicit authentication

If the AUTH parameter is implicit, the access keys can be omitted and the credentials will be loaded from the environment, i.e. the machines running the backup.

BACKUP DATABASE <database> INTO 's3://{bucket name}/{path}?AUTH=implicit';

You can associate an EC2 instance with an IAM role to provide implicit access to S3 storage within the IAM role's policy. In the following command, the instance example EC2 instance is associated with the example profile instance profile, giving the EC2 instance implicit access to any example profile S3 buckets.

aws ec2 associate-iam-instance-profile --iam-instance-profile Name={example profile} --region={us-east-2} --instance-id {instance example}

The AUTH parameter passed to the file URL must be set to either specified or implicit. The following sections describe how to set up each authentication method.

In v21.1 and earlier, if no AUTH parameter is provided with a Google Cloud Storage URI then authentication will default to default. This means that the connection will only use the key provided in the cloudstorage.gs.default.key cluster setting, and will error if not present.

Specified authentication

To access the storage bucket with specified credentials, it's necessary to create a service account and add the service account address to the permissions on the specific storage bucket.

The JSON credentials file for authentication can be downloaded from the Service Accounts page in the Google Cloud Console and then base64-encoded:

cat gcs_key.json | base64

Pass the encoded JSON object to the CREDENTIALS parameter:

BACKUP DATABASE <database> INTO 'gs://{bucket name}/{path}?AUTH=specified&CREDENTIALS={encoded key}';

Implicit authentication

For CockroachDB instances that are running within a Google Cloud Environment, environment data can be used from the service account to implicitly access resources within the storage bucket.

For CockroachDB clusters running in other environments, implicit authentication access can still be set up manually with the following steps:

1. Create a service account and add the service account address to the permissions on the specific storage bucket.

2. Download the JSON credentials file from the Service Accounts page in the Google Cloud Console to the machines that CockroachDB is running on. (Since this file will be passed as an environment variable, it does not need to be base64-encoded.) Ensure that the file is located in a path that CockroachDB can access.

3. Create an environment variable instructing CockroachDB where the credentials file is located. The environment variable must be exported on each CockroachDB node:

   export GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS="/{cockroach}/gcs_key.json"
   

   Alternatively, to pass the credentials using systemd, use systemctl edit cockroach.service to add the environment variable Environment="GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS=gcs-key.json" under [Service] in the cockroach.service unit file. Then, run systemctl daemon-reload to reload the systemd process. Restart the cockroach process on each of the cluster's nodes with systemctl restart cockroach, which will reload the configuration files.

   To pass the credentials using code, see Google's Authentication documentation.

4. Run a backup (or other bulk operation) to the storage bucket with the AUTH parameter set to implicit:

   BACKUP DATABASE <database> INTO 'gs://{bucket name}/{path}?AUTH=implicit';
   

To access Azure storage containers, it is sometimes necessary to url encode the account key since it is base64-encoded and may contain +, /, = characters. For example:

BACKUP DATABASE <database> INTO 'azure://{container name}/{path}?AZURE_ACCOUNT_NAME={account name}&AZURE_ACCOUNT_KEY={url-encoded key}';

If your environment requires an HTTP or HTTPS proxy server for outgoing connections, you can set the standard HTTP_PROXY and HTTPS_PROXY environment variables when starting CockroachDB. You can create your own HTTP server with NGINX. A custom root CA can be appended to the system's default CAs by setting the cloudstorage.http.custom_ca cluster setting, which will be used when verifying certificates from HTTPS URLs.

If you cannot run a full proxy, you can disable external HTTP(S) access (as well as custom HTTP(S) endpoints) when importing by using the --external-io-disable-http flag.

A custom root CA can be appended to the system's default CAs by setting the cloudstorage.http.custom_ca cluster setting, which will be used when verifying certificates from an S3-compatible service.