Windows Azure ACS Namespace Backup Tool

Question

We make extensive use of ACS web api to configure our relying parties and identity providers. This works great. To protect ourselves from software errors, we would like to backup the acs configuration: relying parties, identity providers, rules, keys ... Perhaps we could write this backup, but I wonder if there are any tools for backup copy / restore acs namespace? There used to be some powershell cmdlets, but they seem to have been removed from their locations.

Answer 1

There seems to be no real turnkey solution for backing up the azure acs namespace. So we started writing code that queries the acs namespace using the odata service. For each of the open objects (relying parties, identity providers ...) we execute the request and save the result in a Json file. The full result is quite readable and compact. Since we already had all the code to access the odata service, it was actually a matter of an hour or two to write. Restoring a backup will be somewhat more complicated, but at least we still have information to restore it (complexity is the order in which entities should be created). This is very important, we must write it ourselves. The main problem will arise if the object model is updated,since we will not have a backup of any future properties that may be added. I would really like the backup feature in windows azure. But then again, life is never perfect.