AWS provides the capability to take the snapshot of EBS volumes, but there is some manual effort involved in the process which can result in human error. First approach companies take is to automate using scripts. With ever-growing resources in the infrastructure, it would be difficult to keep the scripts up to date to support the company needs. There is a need for robust automation that can be configured once and forgot.
It is very critical for the business to protect their data on regular basis, and EBS snapshots are an important part of the strategy. If you are running scripts, it would be very difficult to make sure the scripts are running consistently. Someone needs to verify/update the scripts, when there are changes to EC2 instance, like removal/addition of EBS volumes.
What if the script failed and it was detected only now? It is important to make sure everything is running as per the SLAs of the business requirement.
Nimesa offers flexible snapshot policies where say, if the business wanted to protect their business-critical instances on an hourly basis and would like to keep 1 week worth of snapshots, whereas for test and dev instances take a daily snapshot and retain for 2 weeks. Email notification is sent for all successful/failed operations with relevant details. Nimesa helps in bringing back the instances from the snapshot instantly when the EC2 instance is not in the desired state.
In this article, we will see how Nimesa can be used for automating snapshots for EC2 instances and related EBS volumes on a regular basis
First Step is to create application policy with required retention. In Nimesa go to “SLA Policy” menu and select “Application policy”.
Create a new “Schedule policy” from “SLA Policy” menu. In this example, we have created a fourth hourly schedule.
Create a new backup group by selecting the required instance and associate Application Policy and Schedule policy created in the previous step.
Our dashboard gives a comprehensive view of the number of instances in the account, how many of them are protected and are they meeting the business SLAs of snapshot schedules like an hourly snapshot. In case any of the backup schedules fails automatically it is flagged in the dashboard.
About Nimesa
Nimesa is an enterprise-class Application Aware data protection & copy data management Solution for applications running on AWS. It uses native AWS capabilities like EBS snapshots capabilities to automatically protect the environment. Nimesa provides simple policy based lifecycle management of snapshots and clones of EC2 instances
Contact Nimesa @ sales@nimesa.io