For IBM Storage Fusion, there is already a daily service protection backup of the Fusion Hub configuration. While this is important in disaster recovery (DR) scenarios, it's of little use in day-to-day operations, as the configurations backed up in S3 are not in a readable format and cannot be analyzed for important operational details.
It would therefore be very helpful to have an additional mechanism that exports all relevant backup-related configuration data once per day in a human-readable YAML format. Either by directly exporting to a local file on the cluster or by providing a download link for the current configuration offered in the Fusion UI.
For a Fusion Hub cluster, this should include all relevant objects that define and control backup behavior, including all the BackupStorageLocations (including the secrets used therein for S3 and certificate), the BackupPolicies and the PolicyAssignments.
For Fusion Spoke clusters, this should include the relevant custom recipes that are used when application backups are executed. These recipes may exist in different locations, such as a dedicated directory, the ibm-spectrum-fusion-ns namespaces, or within the namespaces of the protected applications themselves. Custom recipes should ideally be stored in some Git repository by their developers and restored from there if needed, but it does happen from time to time that painstakingly created recipes get lost.
Ideally, the hub cluster would receive the recipes available on its spokes and then make them available for download along with its own configuration.
This would also be very useful in situations where individual PolicyAssignments are temporarily disabled. In such cases, the contained recipe references gets lost. To reconfigure the PolicyAssignment, the Fusion administrator must search the Spoke cluster for the exact name and namespace of the recipe in order to manually edit the PolicyAssignment YAML file. It would be much simpler if he could just search for the relevant PolicyAssignment in yesterday's export and recreate it as a YAML file in OpenShift.
Having a daily readable export would make it possible to review the previous state of a policy or Policy Assignment and recreate it much more easily if required. Administrators could simply look up the historical YAML content and restore the missing configuration based on that information.
The goal is to give administrators a simple way to review the effective backup configuration at any time without having to restore data first or inspect internal backup content in a complicated way. This would make troubleshooting, auditing, and documentation significantly easier and would provide real operational value beyond the existing daily Fusion backup of the Hub.