Amazon AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate – Disaster Recovery

1. [SAA] AWS DataSync

So now let’s talk about AWS data sync. It is used to move large amount of data from your onpremises system to AWS and it helps you synchronize data to Amazon S three. And there could be any storage class including Glacier, so s three standard Sree infrequent Access, Glacier and so on to Amazon EFS as well and to Amazon FSX for Windows. And in terms of sources, it can move data from your Nas or your file system via the NFS or the SMB protocol. I will show you a diagram in the next slide.

So the replication task for data sync can be scheduled hourly, daily or weekly. So this is not a continuous replication, this is something that is scheduled and we need to install and leverage the data sync agents to connect to your systems, for example on premises or your EFS. You can also set up a bandwidth limit in case you need to have limitations and not use all your internet connection when data sync is running.

So let’s take the first example where we’re using data sync to connect our NFS or SMB protocol server into AWS to synchronize to either Amazon’s free EFS or FSX for Windows. So in this case we have the Data Sync Agent service sorry, running into the region, we have our NFS or SMB server on premises and we are going to install the AWS Data Sync Agent on premises.

It will connect to your server using either the NFS or the SMB protocol and then communicate using an encrypted connection into the Data Sync service. And the Data Sync service can send the data to multiple places. It can send the data into an S three bucket of any storage classes, including Amazon Sree glitch here. But also we can send it into an EFS file system or an Amazon FSX for Windows file server. So this really shows you the power to synchronize the data between these on premises system and AWS. And this is why it’s called data sync.

But remember, this is not continuous. This is something that runs every hour or every day and it leverages a data sync agent. Another use case for data sync is to do EFS to EFS. So we want to synchronize, for example, an EFS file system across two regions. So we’re going to have our first EFS file system in the first region and then a destination region.

And so in this case, we’re going to create an easy to instance that has the Data Sync agent installed on it and connect to our Amazon EFS drive on the source. And then the Data sync service endpoint on the other destination will synchronize the data into the other EFS file system. And so again, data sync is a really good use case for that. So that’s it. If you remember this, then you’re good to go for the exam and I will see you in the next lecture.

2. [SAA] AWS Backup Overview

So now let’s talk about AWS backup. So the service is name is pretty very obvious about what it does. It is a fully managed backup service and it is used to centrally manage and automate backups across different AWS services. So you don’t need to create any custom scripts or manual processes. Everything can be managed directly from the backup service. So it supports many kind of services in AWS such as FSX EFS DynamoDB, even your Amazon EC two instances, amazon EBS RDS for all DB engines, aurora storage Gateway for the volume gateway, and it also supports crossregion backups and cross accounts backups. So this is really a central service to create your backups in AWS. So if we look at backups, it supports point in time recovery. So Pitr for supported services, it supports on demand and scheduled backups. You can create backups based on tags. So if you tag the easy two instances or your EBS volumes correctly, then you can have a backup policy based on tags.

And then when you create a backup policy, you create a backup plan. You say the frequency of your backup plan, for example, every 12 hours, daily, weekly, monthly, or a chronic expression if you want to customize it, the backup window. Whether or not you want to transition your backup into cold storage after some time, for example, never, or after some days, weeks, months or years. And the retention period of your backup, would it be always days, weeks, months or years?

Okay, so all the options we already know, they’re just centralized into the backup service. So as a diagram very easy in this backup, you create a backup plan from it where you set up the frequency, the retention policy and the services you want to target with a tag based policy. Then you assign AIDS list resources that you want to back up and then automatically the backup will be run and behind the scenes everything will be back to Amazon Sree. So that’s it. I hope you liked it and I will see you in the next lecture.

3. [SAA] AWS Backup Hands On

Okay, so let’s practice using AWS backup. So I’m going to type at least backup into the search bar and open the backup service. So we are going to create our first backup plan. So I’m going to click on Create Backup Plan and we have three options. Either we start with a template or we build a new plan or we define a plan using Jason.

So the simplest for us is to start with a template and we can have different templates. For example, daily 35 day retention, daily, monthly one year retention and so on. So let’s go with daily, monthly one year retention and I’ll call it Test Plan. Next we click on Backup rules and you see we can have many backup rules in our backup rules. So we have two, we have daily backups and monthly. So if I click on daily backup, as we can see there’s a role name. The backup vault is wherever the backup is going. So we can use the default one by AWS, or we can create our own new backup vault if we wanted to. The backup frequency, the backup window.

So when to start, which is 05:00 a. m. UTC start within 8 hours. Or you can customize it if you want. Whether or not you want to transition to cold storage, never after some days, weeks, months or years and the retention period of your backup, for example, this one is retained, is retained for five weeks. Then we can also copy these backups to a specific destination, for example, another region for disaster recovery purposes. So I’m going to save this backup rule and for monthly while we get this similar thing. So it’s going into the default backup vault. It’s monthly on day one of each month and the rest looks the same. So we actually transition these ones to cold storage after one month and then we retain them for one year. Okay, so we have these ready and then I can just scroll down and click on Create Plan. So now our taste plan is created and we need to assign resources to it.

So I’m going to click on assign resources and I’ll just call it test assignments. And here we can choose our Im role to perform these backups. So let’s use a default role, but we can create our own Im role if we wanted to. And because we don’t have an AWS backup default role already, one is going to be created for us with the correct permissions. So that’s perfect.

And then to assign resources, we can either assign them a resource ID, for example, saying hey, I want this DynamoDB table with this resource ID to be backed up, or this EC two instance, or this EBS volume. Or you can say by tags, for example, I can say Environment and then production. And so anything that will be tagged with environment production is going to be backed up. So I’m going to keep these tags and so anything that will be tagged within AWS with these tags is going to be backed up. So click on assign resources. And so just to make it very clear, if I went into EC Two and I were to create an EBS volume, and that volume would have, for example, one gigabytes, and then the key would be Environment production, then this would be automatically backed up by my backup plan because it has the correct tags.

So if we look at our volume right now and we go into tags, as we can see, has Environment Production, which corresponds to the tags that I set up for my backup plan. Okay, so this is the assignments right here, and we can have multiple assignments as well in here, okay? And then that’s it. The backup plan is going to run automatically, and then the backups are going to happen here in my backup vault, okay? The jobs are the jobs that are going to be scheduled and happening. So we have backup jobs, restore jobs, and copy jobs if we wanted to. And then we can look at the settings.

So the settings is around. Do you want to have backup policies, cross account monitoring, cross account backups, and so on. But we’ve seen the basics of how backups work. And so that’s it. I want to show you all this, okay? That’s all you need to know. And I’m going to delete everything. So for that, please make sure to delete your EBS volume.

Or you could wait a day if you wanted to see if the backups work, obviously. And then when you’re done, you take the assignment and you delete it. So type the name of the assignment in here, and then for the daily backup rules, you can delete them or delete directly to the backup plan. And for this, just enter the name of the backup plan and press delete. And that’s it. We’ve seen backups. I hope you liked it, and I will see you in the next lecture.