AWS Operations

• As an AWS admin we are expected to do some operations such as
  • Backups
  • Disaster Recoveries
  • OS patching

Backups in AWS

• In AWS, the generic term used for backup is Snapshot
• Generally the first snapshot is full backup and snapshots from there on are incremental in nature
  
• When we try to delete the latest snapshot the latest changes will be lost. in the below image brown changes are lost
  
• When we delete the oldest backup, the contents of snapshot gets copied into depending snapshots, so we are not loosing data
  
• Backups can be taken in two ways
  • manual backups
  • automated backups
• What is difference between backup and archive?
  • backup is taken for quick recoveries.
  • Backups are frequently accessed
  • archival is done for disaster recoveries
  • archivals are rarely accessed
  • MTTR (Mean time to Reocover) with backups is in hours and from archives is in days
  • Archives are stored in low cost storage solutions (Tapes) whereas Backups are stored in moderate cost storate solutions
• What is point in time recovery (PITR) ?
  • Ability of a backup solution to restore itself to some date time in past.
• Business Continutity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) is an essential setup for all production systems.

Lab Setup

• Ensure you have an ec2 instance with
  • apache server on any linux based ec2
  • RDS database with some data in it.
• We will be using the following services