I am new to AWS and had to take over an existing VPC with multiple EC2 instances.
I am looking for a way to backup the instances (whole disks).
I read about EBS snapshots on forums and this seems a good solution.
The instances' root disks are all EBS volumes.
I read the AWS documentation on EBS snapshot which states as shown below:
To create a snapshot for Amazon EBS volumes that serve as root devices, you should stop the instance before taking the snapshot.
I cannot shutdown the EC2 instances just for a backup.
How do senior AWS sysadmins back up their instances with EBS root volumes ?
With KVM it is possible to pause a host. Is there a similar functionality available in AWS?
Related
I'm looking to setup a demo environment in Amazon that consists of a pre-configured EC2 image that resets itself back to a snapshot configuration every hour, this is would be a Linux VM.
What would be the best way to go about doing this in EC2? Does Amazon offer any tools for scheduling and reverting to the snapshot or would this need to be done from a third party VM or software?
There is no VMWare-like 'snapshot' functionality in Amazon EC2 (where you can roll-back to a point-in-time).
The network-attached disk storage system used with Amazon EC2 is called Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS). While EBS does have a 'snapshot' function, this actually takes a backup of an EBS Volume and stores it in Amazon S3. The snapshot can then be used to create a new EBS volume, which will contain the same contents as the original disk at the time the snapshot was created.
One option would be to launch a new Amazon EC2 instance, which will automatically create a new boot disk from the indicated Amazon Machine Image (AMI). This is the way to launch new machines with the same disk content. However, this might not lend itself well to your "revert every half hour" since it requires a new machine to be started, which will also trigger a new hourly billing cycle.
You might be able to script the deletion of files or the reload of some database tables, but this will depend upon your particular system and applications.
Had some data on ephemeral storage of a ec2 medium instance. They are lost between server reboot. I had a ami created just before the reboot. Is it supposed to contain that data? I had created a new instance from that ami but can't find the data on new ephemeral drive.
ok. I got it. Create Image only creates ebs backed ami. Creating instance storage backed ami is different. It is described here creating an instance store ami
Ephemeral drives on EC2 are, by definition, ephemeral. This means that their data in not kept between reboots, and not saved as part of the AMI image.
You can read more on what you can an cannot do with these kinds of disks here.
I have an EC2 small instance, which has two EBS volumes attached and has EBS as root device. Now the EC2 instance is not reachable for some reason (AWS engineers are looking into it). In the mean while, we are thinking about launch another EC2 instance and attach it to the two EBS volumes. What's the best practice for that purpose? Do I need to take snapshot of the volumes before re-attach to the new EC2 instance? Can we attach to them without destroying the existing data on the volumes?
You do not need to take a snapshot in order to attach the volume to a new instance. You can simply detach the volumes and re-attach them to a new instance.
Your data will not be destroyed in this process.
Hope it helps.
I am new to Amazon web services. I need to create a server image with a few software packages pre installed on the EC2 instances.
One option I am considering is to create an EBS volume with these packages and then use them to launch EC2 instances.
The other option I am thinking of is to create a private AMI and then use them to launch the EC2 instances.
I am not sure which option is better.
One other slightly related question I have is can I create a private EBS volume and share it with some other account.
You should create your own AMI, as it's probably more efficient. In order to create an instance, you must specify an AMI. Specifying an EBS snapshot as the root device in addition to specifying the AMI (if this even works, I haven't tested it) would just result in the EC2 cloud launching your instance with the AMI, followed by overwriting it with the EBS snapshot for the root volume.
It's easy enough to keep the AMIs laying around as prototypes.
I have 2 EC2 instances, each with their own EBS attached. Sitting infront of the EC2s is a load balancer.
These instances run CMS driven sites, where uses can upload files.
What would be the best solution to the problem of a file getting uploaded to one EBS and the load balancer sending a visitor to the EC2 instance whose EBS does not have the file? Some sort of cron which runs an rsync?
Suggestions very welcome!
Thanks
S
I believe the best solution would be to use single shared storage like Amazon S3. It's better to use some plugin for your CMS to store users' files on S3. But if there is no such plugin you can use Fuse s3fs adapter to mount the file system on both instances and configure your CMS to store those files in that specified directory.
there are several solutions to this problem from top of my head i think
nfs/samba shared dir between instances
svn deploy
cluster file systems - OCFS/GFS
cloud management such as capistrano and trriger a deploy when you need
and of course cron jobs when you can do ftp, scp, rsync, s3sync/copy etc
Or possibly, create one EC2 instance as NFS and share it's directories with your other instances.
There are multiple solutions to keep data in both EC2 in sync with or without using EBS volumes.
Can use AWS EFS service instead of using EBS volumes. EFS volume can be shared between EC2 instances within a VPC, and both instances will have data in sync on the mountpath where EFS is mounted on instances.
Another solution is using Gluster File Storage. This can also work between EBS volumes in different AWS region. Refer this link: http://sanketdangi.com/post/5601762671/gluster-config-aws-multi-az
Can mount S3 bucket on your EC2 instances using S3 Fuse. Refer this link: https://github.com/s3fs-fuse/s3fs-fuse/wiki/Fuse-Over-Amazon
May be you can also use "s3 sync" on both ebs volumes. This way both ebs will be in sync via S3. Refer this link: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/s3/sync.html