What is Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager? Time to get some definition stuff out of the way. As a quick recap, what are EBS volumes? Amazon Elastic Block Store isn't easy to use scalable, high performance block storage service designed for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud or Amazon EC2. What are snapshots? Snapshots are a convenient way to back up your block level data regardless of where it resides. These are point in time snapshots of an entire data on your EBS volume. Since this course isn't about EBS or the creation of snapshots, we won't be getting into too many details on the different types of storage available. But in order to demonstrate Data Lifecycle Manager, I'll be walking through creating an EBS volume, creating a snapshot from that volume, along with how to create Amazon DLM policies.

Now, time to answer the question, what is Amazon DLM? DLM is Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager that allows you to automate the creation, deletion, and retention of EBS snapshots, and EBS backed AMI's. Basically, backups for your EBS data. Back in the day we had to deploy an EC2 instance, install a script, add some access keys, set up a Windows scheduler or a cron job to create snapshots or remove them after a period of time. Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager is provided to you at no extra cost.

Now, keep in mind that EBS volumes and snapshots are all storage and will cost you for their use and size. Since the birth of AWS Cloud, one of the key cloud optimization tools that AWS has provided was tags, make sure you always tag your instances. AMI's, Volumes, and Snapshots. If you aren't tagging your resources, Amazon DLM won't work, automation won't work, and scheduling won't work. DLM can also be used in conjunction with other AWS services. For example, Amazon CloudWatch Events. AWS CloudTrail to provide a complete backup solution for your EC2 instances. Now, this concludes the introductory lecture on what is Amazon DLM.