AWS EBS Volume (AWS Elastic Block Storage Volumes), attached and used by the AWS EC2 instances, play a pivotal role in file storage and Disaster Recovery (DR) management. Hence, it is recommended to backup these volumes regularly and pave the way for a better DR management and business continuity, and thereby assuage any data loss in case of a calamity or accidental deletion of information.
Consider a hypothetical use case: A person updates his volume for about four times a day and wants to take a snapshot when he does so. So this calculates to 28 times a week, 112 times a month and about 1344 times in a year. The time and effort spent on this will make the person give up on the idea of taking periodic snapshots.
Thankfully, however, one need not spend time and effort on such calculations or scripting. Instead, use our virtual cloud engineer — Botmetric, which automatically creates snapshots of the AWS EBS volume as per your scheduled settings.
Some of the most user-friendly automation featured on EBS Snapshot creation, offered by Botmetric, are:
1) Creating Backup Snapshots of the AWS EBS Volume Automatically
Ever wondered if you could take a snapshot of the volumes attached just by using the name of the volume or instance or even the instance ID? Yes. It’s possible — with Botmetric. Botmetric users can:
a. Take snapshots of volumes based on Instance IDs at any time in a day/week/month.
b. Take snapshots of volumes based on Instance IDs at regular intervals of time.
c. Take snapshots of volumes attached to instances based on Instance tags at any time of the day/week/month.
d. Take snapshots based on instance tags at regular intervals of time.
e. Take snapshots based on volume tags at any time of day/week/month.
f. Take snapshots based on volume tags at regular intervals of time.
2) Copying EBS Snapshots Across Accounts Automatically
Botmetric’s automation feature also provides provisions to copy the snapshots across different accounts of AWS. That too easily on a regular basis. More so, the delay that occurs due to manual operations can be reduced significantly by automating the tasks. The time in a day/week/month can be set and the snapshot job will be executed repeatedly as desired by you.
3) Copying EBS Snapshots Across Regions Automatically
Copying snapshots across the regions is a tricky task, as the charges are applied for this operation by Amazon explicitly. After the snapshot is copied, standard AWS EBS Volume snapshot charges apply for storage in the destination region. To reduce this kind of cost incurrence, the old snapshots stored in the destination region should be deleted on a regular basis, and the new snapshots must be copied carefully. This requires careful execution of the operation, which can be done with ease using automation.
a) Copying snapshots across region by specifying desired destination region and time in a day/week/month.
b) Copying snapshots to destination region at regular intervals of time.
The above jobs not only help in reducing the workload but also in saving the cost. For the reason that: all the old snapshots created by these jobs will be removed and replaced by the new ones. The user has the provision to specify how many snapshots he wants to be retained. The users also have the provision to delete any number of jobs at any time. Specifying the job names gives a good understanding to the user as to what the job does.
These auto-management features ensure you will never be a slave to the manual work, but will be a DevOps champ! So if you want your AWS tasks to be done accurately in the shortest time possible, automate them using Botmetric.
And we at Botmetric are continually improving our product based on the feedback from our customers. We’d love to hear from you too. Just drop a line on Facebook, Twitter, or Linkedin. Do sign-up for a Botmetric 14-day trial, here.
This special product feature blog is written by our zealous Minja, Swathi Harish.
