Have you tried our built-in backups tool? See https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/export-and...
> How do I connect to existing databases?
It's straightforward in the inline configuration file, see https://github.com/zulip/zulip/blob/master/zproject/prod_set...
There's more detailed documentation available here:
https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/deployment...
We only store transient cache-type state in memcached/redis/rabbitmq, but they have similar configuration options.
> How do I store this in an existing configuration management system?
Our intent is that you configure /etc/zulip using your configuration management system and then use the Zulip installer to install the Zulip software (and it'll configure the services you've configured it to manage accordingly). Our puppet rules are intentionally written to allow only running the application frontend role on a system (as we do in our own production systems).
> You'd better run in on the recommended Ubuntu version, any deviations will cause the above procedure to explode into a ball of mud.
We support all Debian releases and Ubuntu LTS releases in production (which are the only ones worth supporting given that their-non LTS releases are only supported by Ubuntu itself for a few months and thus are structurally long-lived betas). And we're working on CentOS/RHEL support.
I'd love to collaborate on how we can improve Zulip's documentation around your use case. Would you be up for stopping by chat.zulip.org to discuss specific changes?