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

• Introduction
• Amazon S3 and Glacier
• Amazon Elastic File System
• Amazon FSx
• AWS Storage Gateway
• Summary