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Getting Started

This guide walks you through installing Retour and creating your first backup.

Overview

Retour consists of:

  1. operator — Watches Custom Resources, creates RBAC, spawns worker pods
  2. worker — Creates VolumeSnapshots, orchestrates carrier pods, writes backup/restore status to the CRs
  3. carrier — Copies data to/from storage and writes backup metadata next to it
  4. UI (optional) — Server and web interface for backups, restores, and storage backends. Creates CRs, monitors resources, and scaffolds YAML for you. The UI keeps its settings and SSO state in PostgreSQL; backups and restores don't use the database at all.
  5. An identity provider (optional) — the UI authenticates against any number of OIDC/OAuth2 and SAML providers (Okta, Keycloak, Entra ID, Ping, JumpCloud, OneLogin, CyberArk, a generic OIDC issuer, or Dex, which federates LDAP, GitHub and Google).

Prerequisites

Before installing, ensure you have:

  • A Kubernetes cluster
  • A CSI driver with VolumeSnapshot support (e.g., AWS EBS CSI, GCE PD CSI, Azure Disk CSI, Rook-Ceph, Longhorn, OpenStack Cinder)
  • Place to store data which you can reference in storage backend (S3, MinIO, Azure Blob, Ceph RGW, Cloudflare R2, DigitalOcean Spaces)

See Prerequisites for detailed requirements.

Installation

Retour is deployed via Kustomize. Choose your environment:

  • Production: kustomize build deployment/kustomize/overlays/production | kubectl apply -f -

See Installation for step-by-step instructions.

Quick Start

Once installed:

  1. Create a StorageBackend (where backups are stored)
  2. Create a Backup (what to back up)
  3. Optionally create a BackupSchedule for automated backups

See Quick Start for a hands-on tutorial.