Scheduled Images Extension#
You may schedule daily or weekly images of your server automatically, but you
cannot schedule both daily and weekly images for a server. When you schedule an
image, a new resource is created at
/servers/{serverId}/rax-si-image-schedule. This resource, which contains
the retention value and an optional day of the week specification, indicates
that this server will be monitored by the scheduled images service.
If you do not include a day of the week specification in your scheduled images request, the server’s image will be created daily.
If you include a day of the week specification in your scheduled images
request, the server’s image will be created weekly on the day you indicate.
Specify the optional day of the week using a string value from the following
enumeration: SUNDAY, MONDAY, TUESDAY, WEDNESDAY, THURSDAY,
FRIDAY, SATURDAY.
The scheduled images request (for both daily and weekly images) requires a retention value, which is a positive integer that indicates the number of images created by the scheduled images service that will be retained in your cloud storage account. The scheduled images service will remove scheduled images in excess of that value, keeping the most recently created scheduled images (and all manually created images) of that server. You may configure each server’s retention value independently.
Keep in mind:
Smaller snapshots tend to finish more quickly.
A very large snapshot may take so long to finish that it may block the next day’s scheduled snapshot from occurring.
If you have a large amount of data to save, you may wish to explore other backup options.
Important
The scheduled images service is a “best effort service”. Images are scheduled so that they will not interfere with each other or with on-demand snapshots. You may not specify a particular time at which your server snapshot will be taken, nor can we guarantee what time your scheduled image will become active, as the time that an image becomes active depends upon the current network traffic load, and other factors. We do guarantee that all users will receive the same best-effort service.
For weekly images, you specify the day of the week (determined by UTC) when you’d like your server image created. As with daily scheduled images, we create a schedule for you and promise to satisfy it on a best-effort basis. There’s no guarantee that your server’s schedule will stay the same from week to week: we reserve the right to modify the time your image is made so that we can balance the the number of image creations in flight throughout the cloud and throughout the day.
Additionally, as some days of the week are much more popular than others for scheduling images, in rare circumstances we may create your weekly scheduled image in a window beginning 12:00 UTC the day before the day of the week you specify and ending at 12:00 UTC the day after the day of the week you specify. This is the time your image is scheduled to be created. The time it will be available for you to use (that is, when its status is ACTIVE) depends on factors such as the size of the image and overall network congestion in the cloud.
The namespace for this extended element is:
xmlns:RAX-SI="http://docs.openstack.org/servers/api/ext/scheduled_images/v1.0"
API operations for scheduling images#
For examples of these operations, see the following operations: