I am looking to build a lambda function as part of a forensics workflow that will copy a particular EBS snapshot to a manually created S3 bucket in order to store for short/long term forensics requirements. Looking for any pointers!
The copy_snapshot option is not helpful here. It copies an EBS snapshot to an AWS-controlled S3 bucket (in a different region). It's not to an S3 bucket under your control and you have no direct access to it.
If you genuinely want to export an EBS snapshot to your own S3 bucket, or even to some storage device external to AWS, then you need to do it manually.
One way is as follows (some details are thanks to this serverfault answer):
launch an EC2 instance
create an EBS volume from your EBS snapshot
attach, but do not mount, the EBS volume to your instance
export the data (to S3 or elsewhere) using a tool such as dd
There may be tools available that actually implement this series of steps for you, though I was not able to locate any with a quick search.
Related
So I am trying to upload my entire windows volume to S3 glacier and I am following this guide: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/cli-services-glacier.html but this works in chunks. What if my volume is of 500GB? I want to automate this so that I don't have to upload in chunks. I see that tools like FastGlacier have this capability but it is not what I am looking for, I am looking for a CLI-based solution.
For reference, the subject volume is live on an EC2 instance and target is a vault in S3 glacier.
Any help would be highly appreciated. Thanks!
Rather than backing up your volume to Glacier, I'd recommend using an Amazon EBS Snapshot, or create an AMI. This works very nicely and is fast to restore.
Also, rather than using Glacier, I would recommend you store the data in Amazon S3 and choose a Glacier or Glacier Deep Archive storage class. This is much easier to manage.
I am looking for a way to tag the Amazon EBS snapshots with the tags of the volumes.
When I am creating a new manual snapshot from an Amazon EBS Volume, it has to be tagged automatically with the Volume Tags.
Please suggest ways to do it.
From Copy Snapshot API now supports adding tags while copying snapshots:
Posted On: Nov 19, 2019
You can now add tags while copying snapshots. Previously, a user had to first copy the snapshot and then add tags to the copied snapshot manually. Moving forward, you can specify the list of tags you wish to be applied to the copied snapshot as a parameter on the Copy Snapshot API.
This allows the tags to be copied when the snapshot is initiated via an API call. For example, you could trigger the snapshot via an AWS CLI command.
If, instead, you wish to automatically copy the tags when the snapshot is triggered via the Amazon EC2 management console, you would either need to manually specify the tags, or write some code that uses Amazon CloudWatch Events to notice that a new snapshot was created and copy the tags (as per #Calvin's answer).
One easy way to do this is by setting up Cloudwatch Events to trigger a Lambda function that will tag your snapshots.
For detailed example of what that might look like, See: How to Automatically Tag Amazon EC2 Resources in Response to API Events | AWS Security Blog
I want examples on how to backup an EC2 snapshots to S3 bucket, and import it back afterwards.
I found the AWS CLI can export the snapshots to S3, and was explained here
Copying aws snapshot to S3 bucket
I also found the import command from AWS CLI reference, but I failed to execute that command, as I don't follow understand the option
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/ec2/import-snapshot.html
can someone explain how to use this command? especially on how to specific which file on the S3 bucket to import from?
EC2 snapshots are by default stored on S3 standard storage. However, you cannot copy the snapshot to a specific S3 bucket using the AWS CLI.
There may be some third party tool out there somewhere that can do it, but I do not see any reason why you would need to download a snapshot to your s3 bucket? It's like paying for the snapshot twice!!!
Could you mention why you have this requirement? An easier alternate to your problem might exist.
Note:
The two links that you shared in your question, do not copy a snapshot to S3.
The first link shows how to copy a snapshot from one region to another, while the second link is to export a disk image into an EBS snapshot and only the following disk formats are supported for this import:
Virtual Hard Disk (VHD/VHDX)
ESX Virtual Machine Disk (VMDK)
Raw
If I am reading your question correctly, you are having trouble with choosing the bucket from which to restore your backup. You might find this easier using the EC2 console.
In the console - Navigation bar - select Snapshots
Select the snapshot you want to copy from the list
Choose Copy from Action list, complete the dialog box and click Copy
When the confirmation dialog box comes up if you click Snapshots then you can monitor the progress.
Here's some additional information on AWS backups that might help you.
Hey there I am new to AWS and trying to piece together the best way to do this.
I have thousands of photos I'd like to upload and process on AWS. The software is Agisoft Photoscan and is run in stages. So for the first stage i'd like to use an instance that is geared towards CPU/Memory usage and the second stage geared towards GPU/Memory.
What is the best way to do this? Do I create a new volume for each project in EC2 and attach that volume to each instance when I need to? I see people saying to use S3, do I just create a bucket for each project and then attach the bucket to my instances?
Sorry for the basic questions, the more I read the more questions I seem to have,
I'd recommend starting with s3 and seeing if it works - will be cheaper and easier to setup. Switch to EBS volumes if you need to, but I doubt you will need to.
You could create a bucket for each project, or you could just create a bucket a segregate the images based on the file-name prefix (i.e. project1-image001.jpg).
You don't 'attach' buckets to EC2, but you should assign an IAM role to the instances as you create them, and then you can grant that IAM role permissions to access the S3 bucket(s) of your choice.
Since you don't have a lot of AWS experience, keep things simple, and using S3 is about as simple as it gets.
You can go with AWS S3 to upload photos. AWS S3 is similar like Google Drive.
If you want to use AWS EBS volumes instead of S3. The problem you may face is,
EBS volumes is accessible within availability zone but not within region also means you have to create snapshots to transfer another availability zone. But S3 is global.
EBS volumes are not designed for storing multimedia files. It is like hard drive. Once you launch an EC2 instance need to attach EBS volumes.
As per best practice, you use AWS S3.
Based on your case view, you can create bucket for each project or you can use single bucket with multiple folders to identify the projects.
Create an AWS IAM role with S3 access permission and attach it to EC2 instance. No need of using AWS Credentials in the project. EC2 instance will use role to access S3 and role doesn't have permanent credentials, it will keep rotating it.
I am having an Ubuntu ec2 instance at AWS. I took AMI for the instance.
I want to store the AMI to S3 bucket. Is there any way? Also is there anyway to export AMI from S3 bucket?
Update: This feature is now available
From Store and restore an AMI using S3 - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud:
You can store an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) in an Amazon S3 bucket, copy the AMI to another S3 bucket, and then restore it from the S3 bucket. By storing and restoring an AMI using S3 buckets, you can copy AMIs from one AWS partition to another, for example, from the main commercial partition to the AWS GovCloud (US) partition. You can also make archival copies of AMIs by storing them in an S3 bucket.
--- Old Answer ---
It is not possible to export an AMI.
An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is a copy of an Elastic Block Store (EBS) volume. The AMI is stored in Amazon S3, but it is not accessible via the S3 service. Think of it as being stored in AWS's own S3 bucket, rather than yours.
If you wish to export a disk image, use a standard disk utility to copy the disk to ISO format, which can then be copied and mounted on other VMs.
Thank you John.
Hi Guys, I had chat with AWS support also. For your reference ,
10:15:45 AM Myself: Well i have some doubts. I will ask and just clear in me on that.
10:15:49 AM AWS support: Sure
10:15:59 AM AWS support: I'll be happy to do so
10:16:25 AM Myself: Is there any option to sore AMI in S3 bucket.
10:16:46 AM AWS support: No, this is not possible
10:17:05 AM AWS support: AMI data is a simple configuration file
10:17:11 AM AWS support: This is backed by S3
10:17:18 AM AWS support: But not stored in an S3 bucket
10:17:27 AM AWS support: The exact same is true for Snapshots
10:17:45 AM AWS support: It is stored and backed by S3- but not something that can be placed in one of your buckets
10:17:59 AM Myself: is it possible to view that in s3?
10:18:51 AM AWS support: No, this is not something that is visible in S3, I am sorry to say
10:19:57 AM Myself: OK. I need to download the AMI . what can i do?
10:20:19 AM AWS support: AMI data is not something that is downloadable
10:20:35 AM AWS support: Are you seeking to Download your whole instance?
10:20:46 AM AWS support: Or download a complete volume?
10:21:07 AM AWS support: If you originally imported your instance from a VM, you can Export the VM 10:21:29 AM AWS support: But its an EC2 instance that was created in EC2, you can not- I am really sorry to say
10:22:02 AM Myself: Okay fine.
I ran into the same problem and to my delight, AWS has since innovated something about this.
You can store and restore your AMI in S3 now.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ami-store-restore.html#store-ami
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UPDATE:
the version of AWS CLI is matter