When we are using various data services like RDS, EBS, EFS, and DynamoDB to store data in the AWS Cloud, we also have to use some kind of backup solution to meet the data retention requirements. We need a centralized and effective solution for scheduling events like CloudWatch events, cleaning up, common abstraction of API for various services, high availability, and ease of maintenance. AWS Backup helps to ease down the efforts reducing the struggle of setting up an effective solution in such cases!
Refer to Part 2 of the blog here!
Let’s explore this centralized and cost-effective backup service and see how it fits in the AWS global infrastructure.
In this blog, we will cover:
- What is AWS Backup?
- How does it work?
- Why should I use AWS Backup?
- Benefits of Amazon Backup
- Common Use Cases of AWS Backup
- Features of AWS Backup
- Pricing of AWS Backup
- Customers using Amazon Backup
- Conclusion
What is AWS Backup?
AWS Backup is a consolidated backup solution that helps you fulfill your business and regulatory backup compliance requirements by making it simple and cost-effective to backup your application data across AWS services in the AWS Cloud. AWS Backup makes protecting your AWS storage volumes, databases, and file systems simple by providing a central place where you can configure and audit the AWS resources you want backup AWS resources, automate backup scheduling, define retention policies, and keep track of all recent backup and restore activity.
How does it work?
The following notions underpin AWS Backup:
- Backup rules: These rules specify the schedule, frequency, and backup window for a backup. A backup rule can be applied to individual resources or to tag-defined groups of resources.
- Lifecycle rules: Define what happens with old backups. For example, lifecycle rules can be used to shift backups to lower-cost storage tiers or to remove them entirely after a set period of time.
- Vaults: Vaults are used to organize backups, and each vault is secured with a KMS key.
Why should I use AWS Backup?
Backing up your data is an important step toward protecting your application and ensuring that you meet your business and regulatory backup compliance requirements. Even durable resources are susceptible to threats like bugs in your application that could cause accidental deletions or corruption. Building and managing your own backup workflows across all your applications in a compliant and consistent manner can be complex and costly.
By delivering a fully managed, policy-based backup solution with automatic backup scheduling and backup retention management, AWS Backup eliminates the need for costly, custom solutions or manual operations.
Benefits of AWS Backup
- Automate backup: Backup scheduling, retention management, and lifecycle management are all automated, so no custom scripts or manual processes are required. By simply tagging your AWS resources, you can apply backup policies to them, making it simple to deploy your backup plan across all of your AWS resources and ensuring that all of your application data is properly backed up.
- Centrally manage backups: Use AWS Backup’s central console, APIs, or command line interface to back up, restore, and set backup retention policies across AWS services. Configure backup rules from a single console, simplifying backup management and ensuring that your application data is backed up and secured across all AWS services. Back up, restore, and define backup retention policies across AWS services using AWS Backup’s central UI, APIs, or command line interface.
- Improve backup: Enforce your backup policies, encrypt your backups, and audit backup activity from a centralized console to help meet your backup compliance requirements. Backup policies make it simple to match your backup approach to your company’s internal or regulatory needs. Your backups are safe with AWS Backup because your data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Compliance audits are made easier with consolidated backup activity logs across AWS services. AWS Backup complies with PCI and ISO standards and is HIPAA-compliant.
Common Use Cases of AWS Backup
Cloud-native backup: AWS Backup is a centralized platform that allows you to automate and manage backups across all of your AWS services. AWS Backup supports Amazon EBS, Amazon RDS, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon EFS, Amazon FSx, Amazon EC2, and AWS Storage Gateway, to enable you to backup key data stores, such as your storage volumes, databases, and file systems.
Hybrid backup: The AWS Storage Gateway can be used to connect local storage resources to the Amazon cloud. When you restore from backup, data is automatically copied from Amazon back to your on-premises storage devices. Depending on how quickly or frequently you need to retrieve the data, it is kept in one of the Amazon S3 storage tiers.
AWS Backup lets you automate this process, creating a backup plan that defines a schedule and frequency for backups from on-premises storage to S3.
Features of AWS Backup
- Centralized backup management: Centrally manage backup policies according to your backup requirements and apply them to your AWS resources in a consistent and compliant manner. AWS Backup’s centralized backup console offers a consolidated view of your backups and backup activity logs, making it easier to audit your backups and ensure compliance. AWS Backup gives you a centralized backup panel, a collection of backup APIs, and a command line interface to manage backups across all of your AWS services.
- Automated retention management: Create backup retention policies that will automatically keep and delete backups based on your needs. Automated backup retention management makes it easy to minimize backup storage costs by retaining backups for only as long as they are needed.
- Automated backup scheduling: A backup schedule includes the backup start time, backup frequency, and backup window. Customize and create backup schedules or you can also choose from predefined backup schedules. AWS Backup will backup your AWS resources automatically based on the policies and schedules you choose.
- Backup data encryption: AWS Backup encrypts your backup data in transit and at rest, delivering a comprehensive encryption solution that safeguards your backup data while also assisting with compliance. AWS Backup protects your backup data with encryption keys managed by the AWS Key Management Service (KMS), removing the requirement for a key management infrastructure to be built and maintained. The keys used to encrypt your AWS Backup data are separate from the keys used to encrypt the resources used to create the backups. Separate encryption keys for production and backup data add an additional layer of security to your apps.
- Backup activity monitoring: Auditing backup and restoration behavior across AWS services are simple. AWS Backup also works with Amazon SNS, which can send you automatic notifications when a backup is completed or a restore is started.
- Lifecycle management policies: You can set up lifecycle policies to automatically transfer backups from warm to cold storage based on a schedule that you designate. By storing backups in a low-cost cold storage tier, AWS Backup helps you meet compliance requirements while lowering backup storage expenses.
- Incremental backups: AWS Backup stores your periodic backups gradually and efficiently. An AWS resource’s first backup creates a full copy of your data. Only the changes to your AWS resources are backed up with each incremental backup. Incremental backups allow you to reap the benefits of frequent backups while saving money on storage.
- Item-level recovery for Amazon EFS: Customers can quickly and easily restore a single file or directory from an Amazon EFS filesystem backup using AWS Backup. Customers may instantly restore an individual file from a centralized console instead of restoring entire filesystems, cutting recovery time from days to hours.
- Backup access policies: On Backup Vaults, you can define resource-based access policies with AWS Backup. A Backup Vault is a storage container for your backups. Instead of having to establish permissions for each user, resource-based access controls allow you to control access to backups in a Backup Vault across all users. This allows you to limit access to your backups across AWS services in a straightforward and secure way, which helps you satisfy your backup compliance obligations.
- Amazon EC2 instance backups: Without the use of custom scripts or third-party solutions, AWS Backup automates backup and recovery jobs for Amazon EC2 instances. Customers can now schedule backup tasks for whole EC2 instances, reducing the requirement for interaction with the storage layer (EBS). Customers will also be able to restore complete EC2 instances from a single recovery point, making the recovery procedure much easier.
- Cross-account backup: Customers can use the cross-account backup feature to add an extra layer of security in the event that the source account is disrupted due to inadvertent or malicious deletion, disaster, or ransomware. Customers can transfer their backups securely across their AWS accounts and AWS organizations. Customers using AWS Backup can transfer backups manually, as an on-demand copy, or automatically as part of a scheduled backup strategy to just the organization’s trusted destination accounts.
- Cross-region backup: You can also recover from those backups in the new area, saving downtime and assuring disaster recovery and business continuity. Customers may transfer backups across numerous AWS services to different regions from a single console, making compliance and disaster recovery requirements easier to meet. Customers can copy backups to several regions manually, as an on-demand copy, or automatically as part of a scheduled backup strategy with AWS Backup.
Pricing of AWS Backup
Restore pricing :
Backup storage pricing: The cost of AWS Backup storage is determined by how much space your backup data takes up.
Customers using AWS Backup
Conclusion
In this blog, we have discussed the AWS Backup service, its features, benefits, use cases, how it works, and who is using it in the different industries. In the second part 2 of this blog, we will be creating an on-demand backup job of an Amazon RDS database using the AWS Backup service. We will also explore how to use a backup plan to backup Amazon RDS resources to automate your backups on a schedule and how to add resources to an existing backup plan using tags. We will discuss more use cases of AWS Backup in our upcoming blogs. Stay tuned to keep getting all updates about our upcoming new blogs on AWS and relevant technologies.
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