CODEWITHSUNDEEP
amazon-web-servicesamazon-ec2aws-lambdadisaster-recovery
wellwellwell
wellwellwell

Reputation: 169

Best way to make regular EBS backed EC2 instance backups

Problem:

I am trying to find a way to develop a disaster recovery solution for a web application (with database installed on EBS, instead of RDS due to cost saving reasons), installed on a single EC2 instance. Because the database is on the instance itself, I can't use a load balancer as effectively as I could have had the database been on RDS (stale data).

Current DR strategy: manual weekly backups

Until now I have been manually doing weekly backups of my EC2 instance by making an image of the instance. That produces an AMI, plus one EBS snapshot for each attached volumes. (note: I am hoping that the snapshots made are incremental, can anyone confirm this for me?)

Going Forward, suggestions needed:

I will be automating the weekly backups using Lambda, but it seems in case of a disaster, I won't be able to bring the service back online quickly. I would have to restore the snapshot to a volume, and then launch an instance from the AMI, and attach the volumes to the new instance.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 161

Answers (1)

Mark B
Mark B

Reputation: 200537

  1. Yes EBS snapshots are incremental.

  2. If you are creating an AMI, that automatically creates EBS snapshots and associates those snapshots to the AMI. If you create a new instance from an AMI it will use those EBS snapshots to create the volumes for the new instance. So if you are creating an AMI you do not need to restore the EBS volumes from snapshots first and then attach them to a new instance, you simply spin up a new instance from the AMI and it will have everything the previous instance had at the moment you created the AMI.

I highly suggest stepping through this once to verify for yourself that it all works as expected.

Upvotes: 1

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