How can I find out which region an EBS snapshot is in using the aws cli tool?
Well... you can't, and you don't actually need to find out the Region, since you already know it.
Confused? Let me explain...
EBS Snapshots exist in a Region. But the only way to obtain information about a Snapshot is to connect to a Region and make an API call to describe the Snapshot (or use the Command Line Interface to make the API call for you).
API calls are made to an Endpoint, which is a URL that 'points' to a Region.
So... To describe a Snapshot, you first connect to the Region, then ask for details about the Snapshot. It won't tell you the Region in which the Snapshot is located, but you already know the Region since you had to select a Region when making the API call.
So... you can't, but you already know it!
Related
I would like to know if I can change the region of my EC2 instance?
The region I use is Ohio, the reason I decided to change is that I was studying AWS and I learned about latency. I don't really know if I'm sure what latency is, but I understand that my server is located in Ohio, and if my clients don't reside in Ohio, the time to download from the website may not be as fast as the download time for a person who lives in Ohio.
That said, most of my users are located in Brazil, so I need to know if it is a good alternative to change the Ohio region by São Paulo, due to the fact that most customers are in Brazil, which would make their lives more easy.
If it is possible to make this change, is it a very complex thing that I should really leave as it is? I'm just a curious beginner, with the goal of learning more
Note:
I also want to point out, I use AWS RDS, S3 and CloudFront, should I change anything in these services?
You cannot change the EC2 instance's region. However, you can create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) from the instance and then copy that to the desired region. Then launch the instance in the new region from the AMI you created.
Similarly with RDS. While you cannot change the region, you can create a snapshot to S3 and restore that snapshot in the new region.
I configured a set of Lifecycle manager Policies to back-up my EC2 instances last week, but I cannot find any relevant snapshots in the EBS snapshots section. Can someone please advise if I should look for the snapshots somewhere else, or if I should review any specific parameters that regard the policy, or if even I should use another method?
Thank you.
Schedule details
Lifecycle manager will create the backup as a regular EBS snapshot, EBS snapshots are stored in S3 however you do not have access to the snapshot other than through the console/API.
Based on your configuration it will only apply to a tag of Name with the value of Graylog v3.3.2. This will happen once a week at 12:30PM UTC on a Monday.
If the snapshots are not being generated check the following:
Do the target instances have this name and value assigned to them?
Does the execution IAM role have permissions to perform this action? If it has the default permissions then it will be fine to run.
Thank you for the answer and apologies for this issue I'm kind of new to AWS and I managed to solve it.
The issue was simply in the filter applied to the snapshots tab I wasn't seeing the full name. bottom line the policy was working fine after all.
We have an EC2 instance running in AWS EC2 instance. We have our ML algorithms and data that. We have also hosted a web-based interface also in that machine.
Now there are no new developments happening in that EC2 instance. We would like to terminate AWS subscription for a short period of time (for the purpose of cost-reduction and exploring new cloud services). Most importantly, we want to be in a position where we can purchase a new EC2 instance with a fresh AWS subscription, use the backup which we take now, and resume all operations (web-backend, SMS services for our app which is hosted in AWS, etc.).
What is the best way to do it? Is temporary termination of AWS subscription advisable?
There is no concept of an "AWS Subscription". AWS is charged on-demand, which means you only pay when you use resources.
If you temporarily do not want the Amazon EC2 instance, you could:
Stop the instance, which is like turning off the power. You will not be charged for the instance, but you will still pay for the disk storage attached to the instance. You can simply Start the instance again when you wish to use it. You will only be charged while the instance is running. OR
Create an image of the instance, then terminate the instance. This will create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI), which contains a copy of the disks. You can then launch a new Amazon EC2 instance from the AMI when you wish to use it again. This is a lower-cost option compared to simply stopping the instance, but it takes more effort to stop/start.
It is quite common for companies to stop Amazon EC2 instances at night or over the weekend to reduce costs while they are not needed.
EDIT: Just thought of a third option. Will test it and be back. Not worth it; it would involve creating an image from the EC2 instance and then convert that image to a VM image, storing the VM image in S3. There may be some advantages to this, but I do not see them.
I think you have two options, both of them very reasonably priced. If you can separate the data from the operating system, then your best option would be to use an S3 bucket as a file system within the EC2 instance. Your EC2 instance would use this bucket to store all your "ML algorithms and data" and, possibly, even your "web-based interface". Whenever you decide that you no longer need the processing capacity of the EC2, you would unmount the S3 bucket file system from the EC2 instance and terminate that instance. After configuring an appropriate lifecycle rule for the S3 bucket, it would transition to Glacier, or even Glacier Deep Archive [you must considerer the different options of long term storage]. In the future, whenever you want to work with your data again, you would move your data from Glacier back to S3, create a new EC2 instance, install your applications, mount your S3 bucket as a file system and you would have access to all your data. I think this is your least expensive and shortest recovery time objective option. To implement this option, look at my answer to this question; everything you need to use an S3 bucket as a regular folder inside the EC2 instance is there.
The second option provides an integrated solution, meaning the operating system and the data stay together, and allows you to restore everything as it was the day you stopped processing your data. It's made up of the following cycle:
Shutdown your EC2 and make a note of all the specs [you need them further down].
Export your instance to a virtual image, vmdk for example, and store it in your S3 bucket. Something like this:
aws ec2 create-instance-export-task --instance-id i-0d54b0682aa3998a0
--target-environment vmware --export-to-s3-task DiskImageFormat=VMDK,ContainerFormat=ova,S3Bucket=sm-vm-backup,S3Prefix=vms
Configure an appropriate lifecycle rule for the S3 bucket so that it transitions to Glacier, or even Glacier Deep Archive.
Terminate the EC2 instance.
In the future you will need to implement the inverse, so you will need to restore the archived S3 Object [make sure you you can live with the time needed by AWS to do this]
Import the virtual image as an EC2 AMI, something like this [this is not complete - you will need some more options that you saved above]:
aws ec2 import-image --disk-containers
Format=ova,UserBucket="{S3Bucket=sm-vm-backup,S3Key=vmsexport-i-0a1c382e740f8b0ee.ova}"
Create an EC2 instance based on the image and you're back in business.
Obviously you should do some trial runs and even automate the entire process if it's something that will be done frequently. I have a feeling, based on what you said, that the first option is a better option, provided you can easily install whatever applications they use.
I'm assuming that you launched an EC2 instance from a base Amazon Machine Image and then added your own software and models to it. As opposed to launched an EC2 instance from an AWS Marketplace offering.
The simplest thing to do is to create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) from your running EC2 instance. That will capture the current state of the instance and persist it in your AWS account. Then you can terminate the instance. Later, when you want to recreate it, launch a new instance, selecting the saved AMI instead of a standard AMI.
An alternative is to avoid the need to capture machine state at all, by using standard DevOps practices to revision-control everything you need to recreate the state of a running machine.
Note that there are costs associated with an AMI, though they are minimal ($0.05 per GB-month of data stored, for example).
I had contacted AWS customer care regarding this issue. Given below is the response I received. Please add your comments on which option might be good for me.
Note: I acknowledge the AWS customer care team for their help.
I understand that you require some information on cost saving for your
Instance since you will not be utilizing the service for a while.
To assist you with this I would recommend checking out the Instance
Stop/Start link here:
==>https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/Stop_Start.html .
When you stop an Instance, you do not lose any data & you are not
charged for the resources any further. However please keep in mind
that you will still be charged for any EBS Storage Volumes attached to
the stopped Instance(s).
I also recommend checking out the below links on how you can reduce
your costs.
==>https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/reduce-aws-bill/
==>https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/10-things-you-can-do-today-to-reduce-aws-costs/
That being said, please note that as I am in the billing department,
for the best assistance with the various plans you will require the
assistance of our Sales Team.
The Sales Team will be able to assist with ways to save while
maintaining your configurations.
You will be able to reach the Sales Team here:
==>https://aws.amazon.com/websites/contact-us/.
Once you have completed the details in the link, a member of the team
will be in touch with you at their soonest.
I am using AWS to launch a EC2 instance. Fortunately I did it without problem.
What I need now is to make a backup of the data.
I think snapshot is a good way to do it. I have been doing some research and I found a good tool to do it automatically (https://github.com/colinbjohnson/aws-missing-tools/tree/master/ec2-automate-backup).
The problem is that I think it is not enough to make snapshots. In my opinion a copy of the last snapshot needs to be in another region, but I don't know how to do it automatically. I have been searching on internet and only found this:
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/ec2/copy-snapshot.html. The problem is that I don't know the snapshot id (considering it is generated automatically by the first tool I mentioned).
The question is: Do you know any tool that can help me with this problem? If don't, do you know another approach to get a solution.
It is important to know that the service which is given doesn't need to be up 24 hs.
It is my first time using servers so I don't know how long a region in amazon can be down.
You do not need to know a volume ID to use copy-snapshot in the AWS CLI. When executing the command you provide a value to the --source-snapshot-id option. This specifies the ID of the snapshot you want to copy. A snapshot can be copied in the same region or to another region via the --destination-region option.
You can simply call create-snapshot and then copy-snapshot giving it the generated snapshot ID to copy the snapshot to another region. This could be automated via a cron job if necessary.
You can set up a cron job to invoke aws cli which can copy the snapshots to an S3 bucket 'A'. And, cross region bucket replication can be enabled from the source bucket 'A' in region 1 to destination bucket 'B' in region 2. Whenever a snapshot is uploaded to 'A', it'll get replicated to 'B' as well. So, in case first region becomes offline, you can restore volumes from the snapshots in 'B' bucket in region 2.
I'm trying to view an AMI shared from one of my amazon accounts with another amazon account and it's not visible. I've followed all of the instructions here:
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/sharingamis-explicit.html
I've been able to share an EBS Volume successfully, but not the AMI. Are there any undocumented issues or steps anyone has run in to which might keep me from viewing the shared AMI?
Alternatively - is there a way to build an AMI from the snapshot?
It's possible that one of your accounts is set to a different region than your other. At least, that's what I just ran into.
AMIs don't cross regions - an AMI created in region A will never show up in any other region. You'll see this if your two accounts are in different regions, or even if you switch regions in one of your accounts.
There are two things you can do:
Just change regions in your target account. The AMI should magically appear - at least, it did for me. Easy, but unsatisfying, if you really like some other region.
In your source account, copy the AMI into the region that you'd like to use it from. Here are the official docs, but it's pretty straightforward. From the console, right-click the AMI, select Copy AMI, choose your region, and press the Copy AMI button. Wait until copied, then set permissions on the newly-generated AMI.
You'll have to wait, but at least you won't have to go through the song-and-dance that you used to.
You need to be in the correct region as well on the left hand side of the filter below launch there is a drop down menu that defaults the AMI's to "Owned by Me". Since you are in the destination account you need to select "Private Images"
All Amazon AWS AMI's are public and visible to all accounts. Are you talking about an AMI that you (or someone else) explicitly created following these steps:
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/creating-an-ami.html
If so, the instructions for sharing those are here:
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/AESDG-chapter-sharingamis.html
(I'm not sure the difference between your link and this link. They seem... the same)
EBS Snapshots, which are not AMIs, can be shared with other accounts. The instructions for sharing EBS Snapshots with other accounts are here:
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-modifying-snapshot-permissions.html
I don't know of any direct way to create an AMI from a snapshot. I don't think there is one.