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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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Cloud computing comes with amazing financial benefits for the organization…assuming it’s done right. In this presentation, Adrian Cockcroft of Netflix explains how a rapid innovation cycle encourages faster returns and a more economic cloud. He posits that lowering the cost of failure will create a more innovative organization and culture – but how?

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AWS CloudFront is a content distribution service offered by AWS to speed up the distribution of static or dynamic content, such as media files, html, js css, etc as well php. CloudFront serves its content through edge locations. As of Dec 2021, AWS had more than 35+ edge locations across the globe. When the user requests for any static content from CloudFront, it will find the nearest edge location to the user and deliver the content from that edge location to reduce the latency.

The present guide demonstrates how to create a download distribution with the AWS S3 service for CloudFront.

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AWS has two types of AMIs: Instance Store backed and EBS backed. The EBS backed instance can be started or stopped using AWS APIs or the console. The user can configure the application by connecting to the instance. In certain cases, the user can shutdown the instance from the OS directly. The present guide demonstrates how to change the instance initiated shutdown behavior. This is applicable to only the EBS backed instance and when the instance is shut down internally.

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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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What does a cloud computing expert need to know? Let’s dig into deploying applications in the cloud, and day to day operations skills. There’s a lot of material here. I recommend picking a few questions out of the bunch and focusing on those questions, rather than trying to cover all of them.

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In the final installment of this 3-part series, we will discuss data retrieval, account permissions, integrating with S3, and transferring secure data. To recap, part 1 introduced Glacier as an extremely low-cost storage service that provides secure, durable, and flexible storage for your data backup and archival. In part 2, we discussed some functionalities of Glacier including managing archives, creating a vault, Glacier durability and archive inventory. And now, part 3.

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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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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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