--- title: Surviving the uncharted: when dedicated OpenStack... description: A case study describes how Canonical Support recovered a customer's production OpenStack environment after a database action wiped out the control plane... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/surviving-the-uncharted-when-dedicated-openstack-expertise-is-your-best-ally-in-disaster-recovery-vytrqjiyk twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Surviving the uncharted: when dedicated OpenStack expertise is your best ally in disaster recovery | daily.dev og:description: A case study describes how Canonical Support recovered a customer's production OpenStack environment after a database action wiped out the control plane... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/surviving-the-uncharted-when-dedicated-openstack-expertise-is-your-best-ally-in-disaster-recovery-vytrqjiyk og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/vYTRQJIyk.png og:image:alt: Surviving the uncharted: when dedicated OpenStack expertise is your best ally in disaster recovery og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Surviving the uncharted: when dedicated OpenStack expertise is your best ally in disaster recovery **[Ubuntu](https://daily.dev/sources/ubuntu)** · 6 min read · 1 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A case study describes how Canonical Support recovered a customer's production OpenStack environment after a database action wiped out the control plane overnight, with the only available backup too stale to restore directly. Because OpenStack decouples the control plane from the data plane, no running workloads were actually lost, which gave the engineer room to build a new recovery procedure: reconstructing the database cluster and reconnecting every OpenStack service one dependency at a time. The piece cites Cockroach Labs' State of Resilience 2025 survey (62% of organizations skip regular backup restoration tests, 71% skip failover testing) and Acronis Q1 2026 telemetry (85% of recovery servers had RPO monitoring off) to argue that backup validation deserves as much rigor as backup scheduling, closing with a pitch for Ubuntu Pro with Support. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### If the OpenStack database cluster goes down, do running virtual machines also go down? No, running workloads keep operating even if the OpenStack control plane database is lost. OpenStack separates the control plane, which manages provisioning, migration, and scaling, from the data plane, which handles actual compute, networking, and storage. This decoupling means a database failure blocks management operations like provisioning new resources, but existing VMs and services continue running uninterrupted. _Understanding this architectural split helps teams triage outages faster; daily.dev surfaces the OpenStack deep-dives that explain it._ ### How common is it for organizations to actually test their backup restoration process? It is uncommon: Cockroach Labs' State of Resilience 2025 survey found 62% of organizations do not perform regular backup restoration exercises, and 71% do no failover testing at all, even though nearly all claim to run some form of resiliency testing on paper. Separately, Acronis Q1 2026 telemetry found 85% of recovery servers had RPO monitoring turned off, and only 18% of backup rules were set for monthly testing. _Teams building resilience checklists can track this kind of survey data on daily.dev before their own backup gap gets discovered live._ ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Kubernetes disaster recovery: Guidance from three reproducible failure scenarios](https://daily.dev/posts/kubernetes-disaster-recovery-guidance-from-three-reproducible-failure-scenarios-i6ictrsv0) · CNCF · 8 upvotes · 1 comments --- Tags: [#database](https://daily.dev/tags/database) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/surviving-the-uncharted-when-dedicated-openstack-expertise-is-your-best-ally-in-disaster-recovery-vytrqjiyk) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Surviving the uncharted: when dedicated OpenStack expertise is your best ally in disaster recovery","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/surviving-the-uncharted-when-dedicated-openstack-expertise-is-your-best-ally-in-disaster-recovery-vytrqjiyk","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/surviving-the-uncharted-when-dedicated-openstack-expertise-is-your-best-ally-in-disaster-recovery-vytrqjiyk"},"datePublished":"2026-09-02T13:32:19.245Z","dateModified":"2026-09-02T13:41:09.261Z","description":"A case study describes how Canonical Support recovered a customer's production OpenStack environment after a database action wiped out the control plane...","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/76a9044ae2772286eae49ae5085f14f5?_a=AQAEuop","thumbnailUrl":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/76a9044ae2772286eae49ae5085f14f5?_a=AQAEuop","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"Ubuntu","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Ubuntu","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/t_logo,f_auto/v1/logos/e9ae7e11e4574c27a37fcd23062e723e","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/ubuntu"},"commentCount":0,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/surviving-the-uncharted-when-dedicated-openstack-expertise-is-your-best-ally-in-disaster-recovery-vytrqjiyk","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":0},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":0}],"keywords":"database","timeRequired":"PT6M"} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Ubuntu","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/ubuntu"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"Surviving the uncharted: when dedicated OpenStack expertise is your best ally in disaster recovery"}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"FAQPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/surviving-the-uncharted-when-dedicated-openstack-expertise-is-your-best-ally-in-disaster-recovery-vytrqjiyk#faq","mainEntity":[{"@type":"Question","name":"If the OpenStack database cluster goes down, do running virtual machines also go down?","acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"No, running workloads keep operating even if the OpenStack control plane database is lost. 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