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Restoring an Amazon DynamoDB Database
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Difficulty
Intermediate
Duration
39m
Students
2411
Ratings
4.6/5
Description

This course explores the different strategies that are available for when you need to both back up and restore your AWS databases across Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and Amazon DynamoDB. During this course, you will learn about the different backup features that are available in Amazon RDS and DynamoDB, how to identify the differences between them, and when you should use one over the other. The course also explains how to copy and share RDS snapshots across regions and AWS accounts.

The concepts covered in this course are complemented with guided demonstrations from the AWS platform, to ensure you get a real-world understanding of them. If you have any feedback relating to this course, feel free to get in touch with us at support@cloudacademy.com.

Learning Objectives

  • Introduce you to the different backup features that are available in Amazon RDS and DynamoDB
  • Identify the differences between the different backup features and when you should use one over the other
  • Explain how to copy and share RDS snapshots across regions and AWS accounts

Intended Audience

This course has been designed for those who are responsible for maintaining AWS database solutions at an operational level. It is also suitable for anyone looking to take the AWS Certified Database Specialty certification.

Prerequisites

To get the most out of this course, you should be familiar with Amazon RDS and Amazon DynamoDB at a foundational level. For more information on these databases, please see our existing course here.

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to this lecture looking at how to restore your Amazon DynamoDB tables from an existing backup, whether this is an automatic backup to be used as a future point-in-time recovery, or from a manual on-demand backup.

During a restore, you have the ability to change some configuration settings, such as restoring with or without secondary indexes, restoring to a different region, or encrypting your database using a KMS key. Let me now jump straight into a demonstration showing you some of these configurable options, both on how to restore using the point-in-time recovery function, in addition to a restore from an existing manual on-demand backup. Let's take a look.

As you can see, I'm in the DynamoDB dashboard of the AWS Management Console, and we're gonna be looking at how to restore from an existing backup, both the points-in-time recovery and also a manual backup. So if we take a look at our table again, and then if we go across to the Backup tab, we have our point-in-time recovery and also our manual backups as well.

So let's start with restoring from a manual backup. So this was the backup we took in the previous lecture. Now, to restore from this back up all we need to do is to select the backup and then click Restore backup. We can give this a new table name. So let's call this ManualRestore, and you can either restore the entire table data or restore it without the secondary indexes.

Now, you have the option to restore within the same region or to a different region. For this demonstration, I'm just going to leave it in the same region. And also you can change the encryption type as well, using KMS, either a custom-managed CMK or an AWS-managed CMK. I'm just gonna leave it as default, but you have the option to encrypt your restored database as well.

Now, once you've finished selecting those options simply click on Restore table. Now, as you can see here under our list of tables we have our new table being restored and we called it ManualRestore. So that'll take a few minutes to restore, so let me pause the video and we'll come back in just a moment.

Okay, our new table has now been created, and if we go to the items, then we can see the five products as well. So that's how you restore to a new table from an existing manual backup. So let's now restore from a point-in-time recovery. So let's say, for example, in the original table I accidentally deleted four of the items and I needed to get them back.

So what I can do, I can use a point-in-time recovery. So if I go across to Backups, here we can see both the earliest restore date and also the latest restore date. So I can restore to any point-in-time between those two dates and times. So let me now do that. So if I click on Restore to point-in-time, again, I can have a new table name. Let's call this point-in-time recovery restore. This is the latest restore date and time I can choose.

Let's go back six minutes. So this is the point in time that I want to restore to. And remember, this value here can be between the earliest restore date and the latest restore date. Now I want to restore the entire table data within the same region and using the same encryption type. So it's the same options as the restore from the manual backup. And then click on Restore table. So again, this is gonna take a little bit of time, so I'm just gonna pause the video here and then start it back up when it's complete.

Okay, the restore is now complete. Here is our new table. And if we go across to the items, then we can see that we have restored the table back with the four products that I accidentally deleted. So as you can see, it's very straightforward to restore from both a manual backup and also restoring using the point-in-time recovery feature.

Lectures

Course Introduction - RDS Backup Capabilities - Restoring an RDS Database - Copying & Sharing RDS Snapshots - Amazon DynamoDB Backup Capabilities - Course Summary

About the Author
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Stuart has been working within the IT industry for two decades covering a huge range of topic areas and technologies, from data center and network infrastructure design, to cloud architecture and implementation.

To date, Stuart has created 150+ courses relating to Cloud reaching over 180,000 students, mostly within the AWS category and with a heavy focus on security and compliance.

Stuart is a member of the AWS Community Builders Program for his contributions towards AWS.

He is AWS certified and accredited in addition to being a published author covering topics across the AWS landscape.

In January 2016 Stuart was awarded ‘Expert of the Year Award 2015’ from Experts Exchange for his knowledge share within cloud services to the community.

Stuart enjoys writing about cloud technologies and you will find many of his articles within our blog pages.