New AWS Cloud disaster recovery tool (AWS EC2 EBS automated snapshots)

If you run a big cloud infrastructure like us on Amazon AWS that has to support thousands of clients, you better make sure that you have proper disaster recovery processes in place and that your server disks (AWS EBS volumes) are always backed up, working and have enough space.

Through our own experience working with the Amazon AWS environment through the years, we have learned a great deal and can now confidently apply our knowledge into creating a unique AWS Cloud disaster recovery tool.  The aim of this tool is to help minimize against any downtime you may experience with potential AWS zone outages or EC2 failures, and get your systems up in running ASAP.  If you have hands-on experience with Amazon AWS, you will know that this can be a very time consuming task if you have lots of EC2 instances and EBS volumes that you have to recover.

PHASE 1 launch

Our phase 1 launch is in testing mode and already provides some excellent features to manage a backup set of your EBS volumes.  What you can do:

a) See a list of all your EC2 instances per region together with their running state.

b) See your EBS volumes per EC2 instance as well as their sizes and states.

c) Setup an automated snapshot schedule per EBS volume. Each volume can have its own unique schedule. E.g. you may want to snapshot your operating system drives once a day but your data volumes hourly. With the tool you can set a start time and frequency with the click of a mouse.

d) Setup an automatic schedule to remove historic snapshots from your account. Simply enable the schedule and set which snapshots you want to remove, e.g. older than a week, month, year. This feature can help you save cost.

Phase 2 & later launches

At this stage we don’t want to provide too much info, but the tool will allow you to automatically recover or setup duplicate EC2 instances with last snapshots made of EBS volumes in another zone. Imagine how much time you can save, and how convenient it will be if everything is automated for you.

Now imagine always having a duplicate EC2 server ready in another zone that can be fired up with the last snapshot data of your production EC2 instance?

The tool itself runs on Amazon’s very latest DynamoDB database ensuring high IO rates can be achieved.

Screenshots

Main screen showing your EC2 instances per region, with EBS volumes and states:

cloud-disk

Simply setup a snapshot backup and cleanup schedule:

image

We are looking for Amazon AWS customers to help us evaluate this tool and give feedback before going into production. If you are interested please let us know. Please click here to complete the form

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