I have a doubt if in AWS all server-side work is done by cloud manager then why do we store backup for database?
I have studied in documentation that all the things are managed by cloud service providers for the database related things. Then what is the need of storing backup if service provider do everything for me?
You maintain your own backups of RDS instances for the same reason that you maintain offsite backups of on-premise databases: disaster recovery. In your own data center, a fire or terrorism or natural disaster could destroy both your database and your local backups. In the cloud, these disasters tend to take on a different form.
If all of your data is in any one place, then you are vulnerable to data loss in a catastrophic event, which could take a number of forms: a serious defect in the cloud provider's infrastructure (unlikely with AWS, but nothing is impossible), human error, malicious employees, a compromise of your credentials, or any other of a number of statistically-unlikely events -- the low probability of which becomes irrelevant when it occurs.
If you value your data, you back it up independently and outside of its native environment.
Amazon RDS runs a database of your choice: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server. These are normal databases and operate in the same way as a database you would run yourself.
You are correct that a managed solution takes care of installation, maintenance and hardware issues. Also, you can configure the system to automatically take backups of the data.
From Working With Backups - Amazon Relational Database Service:
Amazon RDS creates and saves automated backups of your DB instance. Amazon RDS creates a storage volume snapshot of your DB instance, backing up the entire DB instance and not just individual databases.
Amazon RDS creates automated backups of your DB instance during the backup window of your DB instance. Amazon RDS saves the automated backups of your DB instance according to the backup retention period that you specify. If necessary, you can recover your database to any point in time during the backup retention period.
You also have the ability to trigger a manual backup. This is advisable, for example, before you do major work on the database, such as modifying schemas when upgrading an application that uses the database.
Bottom line: Amazon RDS can manage the backups for you. You do not need to take manage the backup process, but you can trigger the RDS backups yourself.
Related
We need to know what are the best options to set AWS RDS instance (Aurora mysql) that is standalone and does not get traffic from actual RDS cluster.
Requirement is for our data team to write analytical queries but we do not want it to impact actual application and DB performance. Hence we need a DB which always has near to live data but live traffic or application does not connect to this instance.
Need to know which fits better, DL clone OR AWS Pilot light OR AWS Warn standby OR AWS hot standby OR
multi-AZ configuration.
Kindly let us know which one would fit our requirement better.
We have so far read about below 3 options,
AWS Amazon Aurora DB clone, https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/Aurora.Managing.Clone.html
AWS Pilot light or AWS Warn standby or AWS hot standby
. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/disaster-recovery-dr-architecture-on-aws-part-iii-pilot- light-and-warm-standby/
With multi-AZ configuration, we can create a new instance in new AZ, so that his instance will have a different host (kind off, a fail over strategy), where traffic to his instance will be from our queries and not from live prod application, unless there is some fail over issue.
Option 1, Aurora cloning says
Run workload-intensive operations, such as exporting data or running analytical queries on the clone.
...which seems to be your use case here.
Just be aware that the clone will not see any changes to the original data after it is made. So you will need to periodically delete and re-clone to get the updated data
Regarding option 2, I wrote those blog posts, and I do not think that approach suits your use case. That approach is for disaster recovery
Option 3 may work. To modify it a bit, the concept here is to create an Aurora Replica, which as you say is a separate instance. The problem here is the reader endpoint for your production workload, it may hit that instance (which is not what you want)
EDIT: Adding new option 4
Option 4. Check out Amazon Aurora zero-ETL integration with Amazon Redshift. This zero-ETL integration also enables you to analyze data from multiple Aurora database clusters in an Amazon Redshift cluster.
I have a number of databases in Azure that I want to back up in AWS, what is the best type of storage for databases in AWS ?
Can this be automated in Azure ?
In the 'old days' before Cloud Computing, back-up typically involved sending data to a secondary disaster recovery location where there was (typically inadequate) backup equipment that could takeover the activities of the primary data center.
These days, Cloud Computing provides such as AWS and Azure run multiple data centers in the one region. A 'Region' contains multiple 'Availability Zones', each of which is a separate data center.
Also, many services (eg Amazon S3, Azure Blob storage) are 'regional' services that automatically run across multiple Availability Zones. This means that a failure in one AZ does not impact operation or availability of the service. However, individual virtual machines (eg Amazon EC2, Azure VMs) run on single hosts, so each one operates in only a single AZ.
Thus, rather than attempting to copy data to a "different location" or a different cloud service, it is better to take advantage of the backup capabilities offered by the cloud provider.
From Automatic, geo-redundant backups - Azure SQL Database | Microsoft Learn:
By default, Azure SQL Database stores backups in geo-redundant storage blobs that are replicated to a paired region. Geo-redundancy helps protect against outages that affect backup storage in the primary region. It also allows you to restore your databases in a different region in the event of a regional outage.
The storage redundancy mechanism stores multiple copies of your data so that it's protected from planned and unplanned events. These events might include transient hardware failure, network or power outages, or massive natural disasters.
This would not only meet your requirement for backing up data to another location, but it also makes it quick and easy to restore data when necessary. Compare that to sending data to a different cloud provider, where you would be responsible for converting file formats, launching replacement services and loading data from backup. That type of thing really isn't necessary if you are using a managed database service.
Backing-up data is easy. Restoring is hard!
Bottom line: Use a managed database (eg Azure SQL Database) and use the managed backup options they provide. They will give you the redundancy you seek, while making the process MUCH easier to manage.
I have a database hosted in my companies local data centre (source) and another cloud-hosted database (AWS RDS Postgres Online data store)
The local database (on-prem) is updated on an intraday basis (every 1-2 hours), how can I ensure that I move the new data to the RDS Database as soon as changes/updates occur in the local source database (we need this updated data from source to run specific processes/business logic on the RDS database as soon as changes occur in the source databases).
Would AWS DMS or AWS Kinesis be sufficient for this use case?
Try to implement native replication from Postgre, it would be the best method https://hevodata.com/learn/postgresql-streaming-replication/
I am having an AWS RDS Aurora PostgreSQL cluster with four instances with a Multi-AZ deployment serving in Production. Encryption-at-rest hasn't been enabled on this cluster. Now I have to enable the encryption on this existing cluster. AWS docs suggest me to create a snapshot of that cluster and then restore the cluster again with the encryption enabled this time. Ref: Here
Since my cluster is serving in production and no downtime or I/O suspension is acceptable to me. Here are some questions that I would like to get answered before I plan about encrypting the existing cluster:
Is there any downtime during the creation of the snapshot assuming there is a lot of data and a snapshot will take time.
What about the new data that is being written on to the database during the snapshot creation? Is the snapshot creation real-time or I will lose my new data during the time till the snapshot is being taken?
Is this the only way for me to enable encryption on the production cluster knowing that it will result in some database outage?
There is a way to encrypt your AWS RDS Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility Cluster with no or minimum downtime, but it will take a bit of effort.
You need to take the following steps:
For the source DB, you have to take snapshot.
Then copy that snapshot, and check Enable Encryption and select Default Encryption Key or select your Custom AWS KMS CMK, now you have an encrypted copy of your DB snapshot.
Restore this encrypted snapshot to the new DB instance, and you can enable Multi-AZ and add Read Replicas now or modify them after migration.
Now you have two DB instances Encrypted and Unencrypted, but the data mismatched as it is a production database.
We will use AWS DMS to make synchronous replication of data, or ou can use PostgreSQL logical replication with Aurora instead of AWS DMS, it will be better, both will works.
Go to AWS DMS console, create an AWS DMS task.
For migration type, choose Migrate existing data and replicate ongoing changes.
For target table preparation mode, choose Truncate.
Under Advanced Task Settings, enable the awsdms_status table if you want to verify replication status.
Run the migration task and wait until all the records are updated. AWS DMS will then determine the size of the data to migrate.
Then, you need to verify the data in the Encrypted DB instance after migration is the same as the Unencrypted DB instance.
Check replication status in AWS DMS, by checking the migration task and awsdms_status.
You can now route traffic to the new endpoint.
For a smooth cutover, use Amazon Route 53 to route traffic by changing the DNS TTL to a short value, and eventually replacing the endpoint names in Route 53.
Now replying to your questions,
Is there any downtime during the creation of the snapshot assuming there is a lot of data and a snapshot will take time.
According to you cluster setup, you are running a Multi-AZ deployment, automated backups and DB Snapshots are simply taken from the standby to avoid I/O suspension on the primary. Please note that you may experience increased I/O latency (typically lasting a few minutes) during backups for both Single-AZ and Multi-AZ deployments.
What about the new data that is being written on to the database during the snapshot creation? Is the snapshot creation real-time or I
will lose my new data during the time till the snapshot is being
taken?
You will lose your data written after the snapshot has been taken, so you will use AWS DMS to replicate synchronous data to your encrypted DB instances.
Is this the only way for me to enable encryption on the production cluster knowing that it will result in some database outage?
Yes this is the only way, but it will result in no or little downtime.
I have an RDS automated backup from several hours ago. In there is some data, which I have accidentally removed from the current database. Is it possible to extract data from an old automated backup?
Yes, assuming the data was present at your recovery time.
If you used the automated backup feature, you will be able to restore a DB instance to a specified time -- this process will create a new DB instance that uses the data from your backup. Here's a detailed explaination of what would be happening:
The automated backup feature of Amazon RDS enables point-in-time recovery of your DB Instance. When automated backups are turned on for your DB Instance, Amazon RDS automatically performs a full daily snapshot of your data (during your preferred backup window) and captures transaction logs (as updates to your DB Instance are made). When you initiate a point-in-time recovery, transaction logs are applied to the most appropriate daily backup in order to restore your DB Instance to the specific time you requested.
You haven't told us what type of database engine you're using... but very generally, once the new DB instance is in the available state, you will be able to connect to it and extract any data just as you would on the source DB instance.
You can perform this action from the:
AWS console
CLI (rds-restore-db-instance-to-point-in-time)
API (RestoreDBInstanceToPointInTime).
Note that the security group will be set to the "Default" group by default, so you may need to modify the DB instance after it becomes available if you use any custom security groups to connect.