Exploration: deploy VM via restored backup

[rudokemper]

Also... I had a crazy idea. IF we can figure out how to apply the right specifications / customizations from gc-deploy/azure/new-vm.arm.json to a VM restored from a backup... what if this is our solution to deployment in general? Like, we have a "Blank" CapRover VM with the Guardian Connector stack lying around, and deployment just means creating a new VM from backup, and changing a few things like DNS records. So much of the manual work in gc-deploy would be done, leaving the sysadmin to only need to worry about changing secrets with auth0 tenant, updating any API keys, changing passwords, etc. and then post-install stuff for the apps.

Originally posted by @rudokemper in #129

Just wanted to surface this in the right place. Happy to be told this is, in fact, crazy and not worth considering in the least!

[rudokemper]

Just observing that the same can be done in DigitalOcean (c.f. #85). There, it is even easier as you can save a VM state as a "Snapshot".

One thing I didn't mention in the above description is OS & app updates. App updates could be handled by https://github.com/ConservationMetrics/gc-programs/pull/137. But obviously we wouldn't want to deploy from a backup where the OS version has gone stale.

Perhaps a more practical workaround is to create a "deploy VM" every X months. Or just if we know we have some deployments coming up.

Take a possible future partner from which we have heard that we might need to deploy 4 Guardian Connector instances. Instead of doing the deployment song-and-dance from scratch 4 times, we do it only once, and then backup & deploy to new VM 3 times. That would still save a bunch of time.

[IamJeffG]

Is this different from or same as #30?

[rudokemper]

Different.

• Exploration: Deploy the GC stack by abusing Caprover "Restore" feature #30 to my understanding proposes a workflow where you set up a new VM with CapRover, and then use a backup .tar file in CapRover to spin up the apps.
• Exploration: deploy VM via restored backup #78 (this) proposes a workflow where you set up a new VM using a VM snapshot that has everything set up already.