#elasticblockstore

An Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) snapshot can now be copied inside or between AWS Regions and/or accounts, with a specified completion time ranging from 15 minutes to 48 hours. Meeting time-based compliance and business requirements for important workloads will be made easier with this. As an illustration:

Testing: As part of your Test Data Management (TDM) strategy, test new data by promptly distributing it.

Development: Regularly and frequently send your developers updated snapshot data.

Disaster Recovery: In disaster recovery, make sure that important snapshots are duplicated to fulfill a Recovery Point Objective (RPO).

You can get reliable and consistent copies with this new capability, regardless of your use case. You can select the option and timing that best suits each scenario; this has no bearing on the functionality or dependability of regular copies.

Making a Copy of a Time-Based Snapshot

You can use the AWS Management Console, the copy-snapshot CLI, or the copy-snapshot API to make time-based snapshot copies.

Pick the source as normal and select Copy snapshot from the Action menu to produce a time-based snapshot. You selected the US-east-1 AWS Region as the destination, enter a description for the copy, click Enable time-based copy, and specify a 15-minute completion time because this is a time-sensitive snapshot:

The request will only be approved (and the copy will become pending) when you select Copy snapshot if your account’s throughput quotas haven’t surpassed the throughput used by other active copies you will be making to the destination region. If the account-level throughput quota has already been surpassed, an error message will appear in the console.

You may see the shortest possible copy duration for the photo by clicking the Launch copy duration calculator. You launch the calculator, input the throughput cap for my account, and select an assessment timeframe:

The calculator then determines the bare minimal amount of time you can finish by using past data gathered over the course of earlier snapshot copies. Using time-based copy and my current account throughput quota of 2000 MiB/second, you were able to copy 1,800,000 MiB in the last 24 hours. This would have taken roughly 15 minutes.

You can use the console to keep an eye on the copy’s progress while it’s happening, or you can call DescribeSnapshots and look at the result’s progress field. The Amazon EventBridge events listed below can also be used to perform actions (the event is broadcast in the destination area if the copy operation spans regions):

copySnapshot: Sent following the completion of the copy process.

copyMissedCompletionDuration: Sent if the copy is still pending when the deadline has passed.

Things to Keep in Mind

And it’s pretty much that simple! You should be aware of the following regarding time-based snapshot copies:

CloudWatch Metrics: The SnapshotCopyBytesTransferred metric, which is released in the destination area, indicates the volume of data measured in bytes that is transmitted between the source and destination regions.

Duration: This depends on the number of copies and can vary from 15 minutes to 48 hours in 15-minute increments.

Concurrency: If you are copying a snapshot and you start a second copy of it in the same location, the second copy’s time begins when the first one is finished.

Throughput: Each source-destination pair has a default throughput limit of 2000 MiB/second. Through the AWS Support Center, you can request an increase if you want more throughput to reach your RPO. The throughput is limited to 500 MiB/second per snapshot and cannot be raised.

Amazon EBS Snapshot pricing

Time-Based Snapshot Copy of Amazon EBS

By guaranteeing that your EBS Snapshots are replicated both inside and between AWS Regions within a predetermined duration, Time-based Snapshot Copy assists you in meeting compliance and business requirements. The cost of time-based snapshot copy operations is determined by the requested completion time per gigabyte of copied snapshot data. Keep in mind that you may only set completion times in increments of 15 minutes. The following are the fixed rates:Completion durationPrice15 minutes$0.020/GB30 minutes and 45 minutes$0.018/GB1 hour to 1 hour 45 minutes$0.016/GB2 hours to 3 hours 45 minutes$0.014/GB4 hours to 7 hours 45 minutes$0.012/GB8 hours to 15 hours 45 minutes$0.010/GB16 hours to 48 hours$0.005/GB

Complete pricing details can be found on the Amazon EBS Pricing page.

Time-based snapshot copies are accessible in every AWS region.

Amazon Elastic Block Store: High-performance, user-friendly block storage at any size

What is Amazon EBS?

Amazon Elastic Block Store provides high-performance, scalable block storage with Amazon EC2 instances. AWS Elastic Block Store can create and manage several block storage resources:

Amazon EBS volumes: Amazon EC2 instances can use Amazon EBS volumes. A volume associated to an instance can be used to install software and store files like a local hard disk.

Amazon EBS snapshots: Amazon EBS snapshots are long-lasting backups of Amazon EBS volumes. You can snapshot Amazon EBS volumes to backup data. Afterwards, you can always restore new volumes from those snapshots.

Advantages of the Amazon Elastic Block Store

Quickly scale

For your most demanding, high-performance workloads, including mission-critical programs like Microsoft, SAP, and Oracle, scale quickly.

Outstanding performance

With high availability features like replication within Availability Zones (AZs) and io2 Block Express volumes’ 99.999% durability, you can guard against failures.

Optimize cost and storage

Decide which storage option best suits your workload. From economical dollar-per-GB to high performance with the best IOPS and throughput, volumes vary widely.

Safeguard

You may encrypt your block storage resources without having to create, manage, and safeguard your own key management system. Set locks on data backups and limit public access to prevent unwanted access to your data.

Easy data security

Amazon EBS Snapshots, a point-in-time copy that can be used to allow disaster recovery, move data across regions and accounts, and enhance backup compliance, can be used to protect block data storage both on-site and in the cloud. With its integration with Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager, AWS further streamlines snapshot lifecycle management by enabling you to establish policies that automate various processes, such as snapshot creation, deletion, retention, and sharing.

How it functions

A high-performance, scalable, and user-friendly block storage solution, Amazon Elastic Block Store was created for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).Image credit to AWS

Use cases

Create your cloud-based, I/O-intensive, mission-critical apps

Switch to the cloud for mid-range, on-premises storage area network (SAN) applications. Attach block storage that is both high-performance and high-availability for applications that are essential to the mission.

Utilize relational or NoSQL databases

Install and expand the databases of your choosing, such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Cassandra, MongoDB, and SAP HANA.

Appropriately scale your big data analytics engines

Detach and reattach volumes effortlessly, and scale clusters for big data analytics engines like Hadoop and Spark with ease.

Features of Amazon EBS

It offers the following features:

Several volume kinds: Amazon EBS offers a variety of volume types that let you maximize storage efficiency and affordability for a wide range of uses. There are two main sorts of volume types: HDD-backed storage for workloads requiring high throughput and SSD-backed storage for transactional workloads.

Scalability: You can build Amazon EBS volumes with the performance and capacity requirements you want. You may adjust performance or dynamically expand capacity using Elastic Volumes operations as your needs change, all without any downtime.

Recovery and backup: Back up the data on your disks using Amazon EBS snapshots. Those snapshots can subsequently be used to transfer data between AWS accounts, AWS Regions, or Availability Zones or to restore volumes instantaneously.

Data protection: Encrypt your Amazon EBS volumes and snapshots using Amazon EBS encryption. To secure data-at-rest and data-in-transit between an instance and its connected volume and subsequent snapshots, encryption procedures are carried out on the servers that house Amazon EC2 instances.

Data availability and durability: io2 Block Express volumes have an annual failure rate of 0.001% and a durability of 99.999%. With a 0.1% to 0.2% yearly failure rate, other volume types offer endurance of 99.8% to 99.9%. To further guard against data loss due to a single component failure, volume data is automatically replicated across several servers in an Availability Zone.

Data archiving: EBS Snapshots Archive provides an affordable storage tier for storing full, point-in-time copies of EBS Snapshots, which you must maintain for a minimum of ninety days in order to comply with regulations. and regulatory purposes, or for upcoming project releases.

Related services

These services are compatible with Amazon EBS:

In the AWS Cloud, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud lets you start and control virtual machines, or EC2 instances. Like hard drives, EBS volumes may store data and install software.

You can produce and maintain cryptographic keys with AWS Key Management Service, a managed service. Data saved on your Amazon EBS volumes and in your Amazon EBS snapshots can be encrypted using AWS KMS cryptographic keys.

EBS snapshots and AMIs supported by EBS are automatically created, stored, and deleted with Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager, a managed service. Backups of your Amazon EC2 instances and Amazon EBS volumes can be automated with Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager.

EBS direct APIs: These services let you take EBS snapshots, write data to them directly, read data from them, and determine how two snapshots differ or change from one another.

Recycle Bin is a data recovery solution that lets you recover EBS-backed AMIs and mistakenly erased EBS snapshots.

Accessing Amazon EBS

The following interfaces are used to build and manage your Amazon EBS resources:

Amazon EC2 console

A web interface for managing and creating snapshots and volumes.

AWS Command Line Interface

A command-line utility that enables you to use commands in your command-line shell to control Amazon EBS resources. Linux, Mac, and Windows are all compatible.

AWS Tools for PowerShell

A set of PowerShell modules for scripting Amazon EBS resource activities from the command line.

Amazon CloudFormation

It’s a fully managed AWS service that allows you describe your AWS resources using reusable JSON or YAML templates, and then it will provision and setup those resources for you.

Amazon EC2 Query API

The HTTP verbs GET or POST and a query parameter called Action are used in HTTP or HTTPS requests made through the Amazon EC2 Query API.

Amazon SDKs

APIs tailored to particular languages that let you create apps that interface with AWS services. Numerous well-known programming languages have AWS SDKs available.

Amazon EBS Pricing

You just pay for what you provision using Amazon EBS. See Amazon EBS pricing for further details.