AWS Backup — An Introduction to AWS’s New Service for Backups
Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced its new AWS Backup service which is designed to centralize and automate the backing up of data across AWS services in the AWS cloud as well as on-premises using the AWS Storage Gateway. This is Amazon’s first attempt to create a single solution that orchestrates and manages the life cycle of backups across their services.
For EBS backup, we already have a solution “Life Cycle Manager” in EC2, but AWS Backup provides a single resource for all types of backups in the cloud. A solution for centralizing backups across AWS has been in high demand, and Amazon delivered with AWS Backup.
Enterprises have been asking for a way to automate their backups. What enterprises do NOT want is to have to manually manage their own backups, create their own tools via scripts or AWS Lambda functions, or use a point solution for each application they have to protect. AWS Backup aims to be that single point of management and source of truth that customers can rely on.
Architecture:
- AWS Backup is a fully managed service for backup and restore. This allows us to set up backup policies for Amazon EBS volumes, RDS databases, DynamoDB tables, EFS file systems, and AWS Storage Gateway volumes.
- Support for more services other than the ones mentioned is also planned.
AWS Backup is only available in US East(N.Virginia), US East(Ohio), US West(Oregon) and EU(Ireland) regions. - It centralizes and automates the back up of data across AWS services in the cloud as well as on premises using the AWS Storage Gateway.
Advantages of AWS Backup :
- Ease of handling backups; mainly because it’s automated with minimal manual intervention required.
- Daily, weekly and even monthly backups can be set up.
- The pricing model is the same as that of snapshots.
- App data in cloud and on-premises can be backed up in a common way (i.e., same backup policy for cloud data and Storage Gateway volumes).
Below is AWS Backup UI:
We have 3 types of backup plans:
We have different types of plans if we choose option Start from an existing plan.
We have daily and monthly backups if we choose Daily-Monthly-1yr-Retention.
I just selected daily backups and clicked on create plan.
Now, you can assign resources with your plan, so click on “Assign resources”. I selected EBS as the resource.
Once we select EBS, all volume IDs in your region will be selected, but you can choose which ones to include.
Now AWS Backup will backup according to your assigned plan.
If you want to learn more about AWS Backup, take a look at the article below.
