What are EBS Volumes?
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) is a service that provides block-level storage volumes for use with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances. One way to ensure the data on your EBS volumes is protected is by creating regular backups, also known as snapshots.
There are a few different ways you can automate the process of creating EBS snapshots:
Use the Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling feature to automatically create snapshots as part of an AMI launch configuration. This will ensure that a snapshot is taken every time a new EC2 instance is launched.
Use AWS Lambda and the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) to create a function that will be triggered on a schedule to create snapshots of your EBS volumes.
Use the AWS Data Pipeline service to schedule the creation of snapshots. This service allows you to specify when and how often snapshots should be created, as well as any additional processing that should be performed on the snapshots (such as copying them to Amazon S3 for long-term storage).
Use third-party tools such as N2W Software's Cloud Protection Manager (CPM) or Cloud Ranger to automate the creation and management of EBS snapshots. These tools can be configured to create snapshots on a schedule and also provide features such as retention policies to help you manage the number of snapshots you have.
But here we are doing this via Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) Lifecycle Manager to automate the creation and management of snapshots for your EBS volumes.
Yes, you can use Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Lifecycle Manager, to automate the creation and management of snapshots for your EBS volumes. EBS Lifecycle Manager is a service that allows you to define policies for the lifecycle of your snapshots, including when they should be created and how long they should be retained.
Once the policy is in place, EBS Lifecycle Manager will automatically create snapshots for the specified volumes according to the schedule you defined. You can view the status of the policy and the snapshots it has created by going to the EBS Lifecycle Manager page in the AWS Management Console.
To use EBS Lifecycle Manager to automate the creation of snapshots, follow these steps:
Sign in to the AWS Management Console and navigate to the EBS Lifecycle Manager page.
Click the "Create Snapshot Lifecycle Policy" button.
Enter a name and description for the policy.
Select the EBS volumes you want to include in the policy. My EBS name is "test-volume-for-snapshot".
Set the frequency and start time for snapshot creation. You can choose to create snapshots daily, weekly, or monthly, and specify a specific time for the snapshots to be created.
Set the retention period for the snapshots. You can specify how long you want to retain each snapshot or set a limit on the number of snapshots you want to retain. I have set it to retain max 5 snapshots every 1 hour to take a snapshot.
Review the policy and click "Create policy" to save it.
After 1 Day there are 5 snapshots which are taken after every 1 hour according to our defined rules.
Note:- Regardless of the method you choose, it's important to regularly test your backups to ensure they can be restored successfully and to validate the integrity of the data they contain.