Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces AWS Backup Service

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced its new AWS Backup, a centralized and fully-managed backup service.

The newly launched AWS Backup Service will allow customers to back up their data across AWS services & on-premises easily and at a faster speed.

AWS Backup will protect storage volumes, databases, and file systems with a single service. It will allow AWS users to configure and audit the AWS resources they backup, automate backup scheduling, set retention policies, and monitor recent backups and restores in a single place.

Multiple AWS services for databases, block storage, object storage, and file systems to provide backup capabilities, but the announcement noted that AWS users are creating custom scripts to automate scheduling, enforce retention policies, and consolidate backup activity across several services in order to better meet their business and regulatory compliance requirements.
As enterprise data gets distributed across multiple services among databases, block storage, object storage, and file systems, there is a need to standardize backup mechanisms across all services including on-premise data. AWS is trying to achieve this objective with its AWS Backup service.

Once the backup policies are defined for resources in AWS management console, AWS backup services handle all backup tasks for those AWS resources across different AWS services along with their retention period.

Executive Opinion

VP of Storage, Automation, and Management Services, AWS, Bill Vass, said, “As the cloud has become the default choice for customers of all sizes, it has attracted two distinct types of builders. Some are tinkerers who want to tweak and fine-tune the full range of AWS services into the desired architecture, and other builders are drawn to the same breadth and depth of functionality in AWS but are willing to trade some of the service granularity to start at a higher abstraction layer so they can build even faster. We designed AWS Backup for this second type of builder who has told us that they want one place to go for backups versus having to do it across multiple, individual services. Today, we are proud to make AWS Backup available with support for block storage volumes, databases, and file systems, and over time, we plan to support additional AWS services."

AWS Backup Availability

To start with, AWS Backup is available and integrated with Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), and AWS Storage Gateway to AWS Simple storage (S3). The AWS backup service also supports tiering of older backups to Amazon Glacier. Support of other AWS services will come in future. As AWS Backup service now integrates with AWS Storage Gateway, it is now possible to backup on-premises application data.

More details are available here.