image
AWS Backup
AWS Backup
Difficulty
Intermediate
Duration
42m
Students
9264
Ratings
4.7/5
Description

With so many different storage solutions available in AWS, at times it’s difficult to determine the best way to architect your storage needs in the most cost-optimized way. This course has been designed to help you understand the different costs associated with each of the AWS services currently listed under the ‘Storage’ category, and when you might select one option within a service over another one. 

This course explores the pricing metrics of a variety of AWS services including Amazon S3, Glacier storage classes, Elastic File System, FSx, Storage Gateway, and AWS Backup. For any feedback, queries, or suggestions, please feel free to contact us at support@cloudacademy.com.

Learning Objectives

  • Understand the various pricing metrics implemented across different storage services in AWS
  • Gain a full insight into your expected costs without any hidden surprises appearing on your bill

Intended Audience

This course is suitable for:

  • Storage engineers responsible for maintaining and storing data within the enterprise
  • AWS Architects who are designing new solutions requiring data storage capabilities
  • Individuals looking to begin their certification journey with either the AWS Cloud Practitioner or one of the three Associate-level certifications

Prerequisites

This is an intermediate-level course to AWS storage services and therefore, to get the most out of it, you should have some basic knowledge of the services discussed.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to this lecture which will focus on AWS Backup. If you are new to this service, then at a high level, this is a solution to help you manage and implement backups across a number of different supported AWS services. For the latest supported services offered by AWS backup, please see the AWS documentation found here. It is also possible to automate the backup of data from on-premises thanks to its connectivity with the AWS Storage Gateway service.

AWS Backup acts as a central hub to manage backups across your environment, across multiple regions, centralizing management and providing full auditability in addition to assisting with specific compliance controls. Having a managed service monitor and control your backups allows for all logging to be consolidated in a single place, in addition to seeing the status of completed backups and perform and restores required.

The service itself uses backup features from existing services, so for example, if you were to manage your EBS backups, AWS Backup would manage these through the EBS Snapshot feature as a way of performing the backup.

When using AWS Backup you will need to create backup policies or backup plans. These simply determine the exact requirements that you need for your backups and contain information such as:

  • A backup schedule
  • Backup window
  • Lifecycle rules, such as the transition of data to cold storage after a set period
  • A backup vault, which is where your backups are stored and encrypted through the use of KMS encryption keys
  • Regional copies
  • Tags

Once you have created your backup plans, you can then assign resources to them. This allows you to create multiple backup plans each with different criteria to meet the backup needs of different types of resources. Through the use of tags, you can associate multiple resources at once using tag-based backup policies, this ensures you capture all of the required resources at once within your plan.

From a cost perspective, the only real optimization available is when you are using services that support both warm and cold storage, where data is transitioned between the two via lifecycle rules which are configured within the backup plan. At the time of writing this course, the only service that supports the use of lifecycle policies is the Elastic File System, EFS. However, this will likely change over time so be sure to review the product pricing page.

Warm storage is backed by Amazon S3 storage providing millisecond access time. Cold storage is as expected backed by the Glacier storage class, with an approximate restore time of 3-5 hours offering a lower price point per GB-month than warm storage.

For backup storage when using AWS Backup, all charges use the metric GB-month, and depending on the resource type used, will depend on how much AWS Backup charges per GB-month.

However, with backup, comes the inevitable restore, and here there is also a cost implication. Again, for resources that support both warm and cold storage options, it is again more cost-effective when restoring from cold storage, however, the retrieval time is a lot longer. Much like Backup storage costs, all pricing where applicable is charged by GB-month, and I say where applicable as for many of the services it is free to restore your data as shown in the table.

AWS Backup is a great way to centralize, monitor and gain a bird's-eye view of your backups from multiple regions. Through the use of Backup plans, you can configure different requirements for different resources and implement life-cycles rules for supported resources to help in the optimization of your backup costs through warm and cold storage, backed by Amazon S3 and Glacier respectively. There are two pricing points that you need to be aware of, those of Backup Storage, and then again the restoration of your data. When possible, implement life-cycle rules to ensure you gain maximum benefit of cheaper storage where possible.

 

Lectures

About the Author
Students
236921
Labs
1
Courses
232
Learning Paths
187

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.