Protecting Azure SQL Data with Backup Short-Term Retention Policies

Question

Pulumi · Accepted Answer

When working with Azure SQL databases, it is fundamental to protect your data by implementing backup strategies that meet your recovery objectives. Azure SQL provides backup retention policies that you can configure to determine how long your backups are retained before being deleted.

In this guidance, I will show you how to set up a Backup Short-Term Retention Policy for an Azure SQL Database using Pulumi, a modern infrastructure as code tool. We'll use the `azure-native.sql.BackupShortTermRetentionPolicy` resource provided by the Pulumi Azure Native provider to create a policy that specifies the number of days you want to retain the database backups. This is useful to recover from accidental deletes or corruptions that happen within that retention period.

Here is how you can define and apply a short-term retention policy for an Azure SQL database:

1. **Define the Azure SQL Database**: First, create an instance of the `azure_native.sql.Database` class. This represents a database in your Azure SQL Server where you will apply the retention policy.

2. **Define the Backup Short-Term Retention Policy**: Create an instance of the `azure_native.sql.BackupShortTermRetentionPolicy` class, linked to the database you created. The `retentionDays` property specifies the number of days you want to retain backups.

Let's jump into the code that accomplishes the above steps:

```python
import pulumi
import pulumi_azure_native as azure_native

# Let's assume that the resource group and SQL server are already defined.
# The resource group name.
resource_group_name = 'myResourceGroup'
# The Azure SQL Server name which hosts the database.
sql_server_name = 'mySqlServer'

# Define an Azure SQL Database.
sql_db = azure_native.sql.Database(
    resource_name='mySqlDatabase',
    resource_group_name=resource_group_name,
    server_name=sql_server_name,
    location='eastus',  # Ensure the location matches your resource group's location.
    sku=azure_native.sql.SkuArgs(
        name='Standard_S0',  # This is an example SKU. Change to fit your requirements.
    ),
    # Further properties can be set as needed.
)

# Define a Backup Short-Term Retention Policy for the SQL Database.
short_term_policy = azure_native.sql.BackupShortTermRetentionPolicy(
    resource_name='mySqlShortTermRetentionPolicy',
    resource_group_name=resource_group_name,
    database_name=sql_db.name,
    server_name=sql_server_name,
    policy_name='default',  # This is typically set to 'default'.
    retention_days=7,  # Retain backups for 7 days. Adjust this value as needed.
)

# Export the SQL database ID and the retention policy ID.
pulumi.export('sqlDatabaseId', sql_db.id)
pulumi.export('backupPolicyId', short_term_policy.id)
```

This program sets up a backup policy that retains backups of the specified Azure SQL Database for 7 days. You can adjust the `retention_days` parameter based on your business requirements and recovery objectives. Remember that the names and configurations used in this example are for demonstration purposes, and you should customize them to match your application and organizational standards.

Each of the Pulumi resources used in this program has well-defined properties and behaviors, which you can find in the Pulumi documentation:

- [azure_native.sql.Database documentation](https://www.pulumi.com/registry/packages/azure-native/api-docs/sql/database/)
- [azure_native.sql.BackupShortTermRetentionPolicy documentation](https://www.pulumi.com/registry/packages/azure-native/api-docs/sql/backupshorttermretentionpolicy/)

This program is an end-to-end Pulumi program that you can run as a stand-alone deployment script, provided you have preconfigured the Pulumi CLI and Azure provider settings appropriately. The style used is typical of Pulumi's infrastructure-as-code approach where we define resources declaratively and apply them to define the desired end state of our infrastructure.