Oracle Cloud Object Storage as a Backend

[theabmitra]

Output of restic version

restic 0.16.0 compiled with go1.20.6 on darwin/amd64

What should restic do differently? Which functionality do you think we should add?

Add OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure) as a backend.

What are you trying to do? What problem would this solve?

This will allow end users of Oracle Cloud to use restic for backing up data to OCI Object Storage , using various OCI auth mechanisms like:

• user principal
• instance principal
• workload identity

[MichaelEischer]

From what I can tell, OCI Object Storage also offers an S3 API. We're not particularly eager to add new backends as these come with a significant maintenance burden. (We'd also need a way to continuously run tests for the backend).

I'll leave the issue open for now to see how much interest there is for this feature, however, I think that using the S3 compatible API is the way to go.

[theabmitra]

I would love to contribute to this and noticed backends like azure were running tests by setting env variables. i feel this would be a great addition for OCI customers mainly due to auth mechanisms like instance principals and workload identity.

[anders-swanson]

OCI Object Storage does support S3 compatibility, but to get a full feature set (like auth mechanisms, among other things), native OCI APIs should be used.

[konidev20]

Hey @theabmitra,

I see that rclone supports Oracle Object Storage. If you have an immediate use case, you can use rclone as a backend with Oracle Object Storage configured.

However, there would be some performance hits, due to the overheads of rclone REST. We had done some tests when we proposed SMB as a backend for restic sometime back #4185, the differences between rclone+restic and direct SMB connections were significant.

We will draw more interest if we can create a draft PR to test and compare the performance between using Oracle Object Storage SDK in Golang and the rclone method.

I am happy to help with a draft PR.

[Edit]
PS: The performance benefits must be significant enough to add to the maintenance overheads.
[/Edit]

[theabmitra]

@konidev20 we also want to support Velero as well, and since velero internally defaults to restic , we would prefer restic than rclone.

[konidev20]

Looks like under the hood rclone also uses the S3-Compatible API Configure rclone for Object Storage

To configure rclone for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Object Storage, you must use the Amazon S3 Compatibility API. First, you need to obtain proper credentials and the API endpoint and then set the correct environment variables.

I agree with:

OCI Object Storage does support S3 compatibility, but to get a full feature set (like auth mechanisms, among other things), native OCI APIs should be used.