EC2 Backup Strategies
Many backup and recovery tools provided from AWS
- EC2 does not backup data by default.
- Automating the process to run at regular, predetermined intervals is essential.
- Many strategies available, decide amongst
- Snapshots Vs. AMI
- In-House Scripting Vs. Third-Party EC2 Backup Solution
EBS Snapshots
- Create snapshots if EC2 instances are stored via EBS.
- method use Amazon S3, which is natively API-based
- Snapshots are backups of Amazon EBS volumes redundantly stored by Amazon S3.
- At first, an exact copy of volume is created.
- Subsequent snapshots will only capture incremental block-level changes of original.
- Hence, quick, efficient means for backing up and restoring data.
- Snapshot copies can be copied to other AWS region, for disaster recovery.
- Extra copy in another region, can prevent complete data loss during a failure.
Amazon Machine Image (AMI)
- AMI provides information required to launch an EC2 instance.
- Specify an AMI during launching an instance
- Launch as many instances from AMI per requirement
- method use Amazon S3, which is natively API-based
- AMI is an encrypted machine image
- Contains all information necessary to restore data,
- Also has a template for root volume for instance
- Template has details on
- the operating system
- application server
- applications
- launch permissions, etc.
- instance store-based AMIs against EBS, are
- slower
- less flexible
- more costly
In-House Scripting
- User can leverage existing scripts being used in organization
- AWS provides option to process and automate backup process using their in-house scripting.
- Helps in automating the backup process.
- can also prove to be expensive and time-consuming
- can become a laborious and time-consuming process if scaling up data.
Third-Party EC2 Backup Solutions
- provide centralized backup management system
- easily implement and manage EC2 backup
- Can schedule backups, manage retention and recover data
- Can also easily scale with data
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