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In part one I described the AWS EBS snapshot mechanism. In this part I will drill deeper on how to calculate the EBS snapshot cost. I �?will show how to be able to do a rough estimation or even to perform�?an accurate cost analysis using monitoring tools.

Rough estimation

In order to estimate how large your EBS snapshots will be, you need to know how much your volumes are changing.�?One way would be to guesstimate,we can use a simple thumb rule that is often used in- backup planning: A typical data volume of a production server changes about 3% a day. Let’s try and calculate the cost. Assuming a 1TB EBS volume, that is 70% full at first. We take snapshots and keep them for 30 days. So, the first full will be taking 700GB (70% of 1TB). For the incremental snapshots we can multiply 30 (days) by 30GB (3% of 1TB) and we reach 900GB. Add them together and we reach about 1.6TB of total snapshot storage. AWS compresses the snapshots when they are stored in S3.

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Availability and Uptime Management is one of five components in the ITIL Service Delivery area. It is responsible for ensuring application systems are up and available for use according to the service criticality and the defined Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

Your uptime management team should analyze your online business availability requirements and ensure that optimized, cost-effective contingency plans are put in place and tested on a regular basis to ensure an online robust service that meets the business needs. For example, Internet ecommerce systems may have almost zero recovery RTO (Recovery Time Objective) in comparison to less critical, non-customer-facing applications where even a few days of recovery can be provisioned on a less expensive cloud infrastructure with limited redundancy capabilities.

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AWS status checks help the user to identify problems that would stop the instance from running an application. The AWS EC2 status check allows the user to monitor the status of system reachability and instance status.�?The EBS volumes are used for persistent data storage. It is always recommended to store the data to the EBS volume rather than having a transient storage for the persistent storage option. In the rarest of cases, there could be a probability that something could happen to the EBS volume, which could create inconsistency in the volume data. The AWS EBS volume status check helps to detect the impaired volumes. The impaired volume may not be available immediately.

The present guide demonstrates how to check the status of the EBS volume and enable auto enabled IO.

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Cloud service disruptions may happen. For example, during the past December, AWS had an ELB problem in us-east-1.

This service disruptions�?was not a huge concern for us, since the system was in staging phase and there was no traffic. However, we took this opportunity to learn and prepare ourselves. I’m sparing you the learning shenanigans, so you can follow and implement the solution without waiting for the next outage to happen.

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Adopting the cloud �?must come with a management solution strategy.�?Cloud Management refers to all cloud environment�?aspects�?and their related�?tasks. Tasks include deploying, monitoring, analyzing and more.

Many IT organizations today running to adopt the new disruptive cloud�?methodologies. Choosing to run a business on a cloud is a strategic�?decision, picking the right way to�?orchestrate�?your cloud resources should be an integral part of your cloud adoption strategy.

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When you keep important business data in your EC2 servers, you need a backup and disaster recovery (DR) solution like you would for any server. For operational backup, the most efficient and effective approach in EC2 is to use EBS snapshots. These are the parallel of hardware snapshots in a traditional data center.In this post we will discuss the�?challenges you encounter when you use EBS snapshots.

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AWS is ideally suited for making the user’s applications tolerant to disaster. One of the options for making the user’s application suitable to DR is to keep a backup of the data / application setup in multiple regions. If the first region is not reachable for some reason, the user can start the application from the other region.�? In Dec, 2021 AWS introduced functionality to copy snapshots across regions.

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The cloud definitely marks a new era. Not only can we manage our resources in a flexible way and with no capital investment, but we can also enjoy the state-of-the-art infrastructure of large cloud providers, like AWS cloud. Specifically, when we use EC2 to compute endless resources, we know that in terms of the durability of our virtual servers, power supply, and storage, we can trust AWS to have the best of the best.

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In case of a disaster we would like to make sure that our applications are still up and running, while taking advantage of our failover hosting/cloud provider. The Disaster Recovery (DR) architecture is driven by the criticality of applications and data. The decision regarding what to back up and deploy eventually translates into ongoing costs that can be extremely significant. Every IT organization has its own high level policy guidelines. These policies are eventually translated into the policy deployed for each of the different applications the enterprise runs. The CIO and its team need to make sure they define both the high level policies and the actual budget that can be spent for DR matters.

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The policies for Disaster Recovery (DR) in an enterprise are driven by the criticality of applications and data. As the public cloud has gained in credibility, more and more IT teams are taking advantage of the failover public cloud provider as a way of addressing DR and ensuring business continuity.

On the following presentation Lahav Savir, architect and CEO of�?Emind Systems, gives an introduction to Disaster Recovery and presents his insights based on Emind’s best practices.

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