Why I built a self-hosted centralized backup manager
6.9 relevance
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actionability 8
community 5
strategic 5
personal 7
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Self-hosted backup manager design, relevant to infrastructure and DevOps practices.
Summary
Arkeep centralizes multi-machine backups via a server/agent model where agents use persistent outbound gRPC streams, eliminating inbound ports and SSH. The server orchestrates Restic-based jobs with pre/post hooks, streaming real-time logs and metrics to a SQLite/PostgreSQL database, while supporting OIDC SSO (e.g., Zitadel) for ISO 27001 compliance.
Key Takeaways
- Implement centralized job dispatch via persistent outbound gRPC streams instead of SSH polling to simplify NAT traversal, enhance security, and enable real-time monitoring for multi-node systems.
Why it matters
This demonstrates a production-grade agent orchestration pattern using outbound-only gRPC streams, directly applicable to building secure, auditable distributed systems in cloud-native environments.