Amazon Web Services (AWS) is used by many organizations to backup on-premise and cloud-based resources. AWS Backup is a new Amazon service that centrally manages backups across the enterprise, both for on-premise and cloud-based resources.
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AWS backup has two common meanings:
For years, AWS has offered tools for each of these scenarios. For example, you can automate EBS snapshots to backup local storage for an EC2 instance, or use AWS Storage Gateway to backup data from local storage devices to Amazon S3.
However, in 2019 Amazon took its backup offering one step further, launching a dedicated service named AWS Backup, which lets you automate and centrally manage backups across the enterprise.
Source: AWS
AWS Backup supports both of the scenarios above—it lets you backup data from Amazon EFS, DynamoDB, RDS or EBS, and also from on-premise resources via the AWS Storage Gateway.
AWS Backup doesn’t replace the previous backup technologies offered by AWS. It is a central management interface that brings those technologies together, letting you orchestrate and schedule backups easily in one place.
AWS Backup is built around the following concepts:
AWS Backup lets you define a new backup using the AWS Console, or define one programmatically using a JSON file.
Follow the process below to create a new backup plan.
Below are a few common use cases for AWS Backup, and the underlying Amazon backup technologies it manages.
You can use the AWS Storage Gateway to integrate local storage resources with the Amazon cloud. When you restore from backup, data is automatically copied from Amazon back to your on-premise storage devices. Data is stored in one of the Amazon S3 storage tiers, depending on how quickly or frequently you need to access the data.
AWS Backup lets you automate this process, creating a backup plan that defines a schedule and frequency for backups from on-premises storage to S3.
AWS lets you backup its cloud-based database services—Amazon RDS and DynamoDB, using their built-in backup capabilities. You can also backup self-hosted databases, running on Amazon EC2 instances and stored in EBS volumes, by automating EBS snapshots.
AWS Backup lets you automate all these backups in one place by defining one or more backup plans, and specifying the databases or group of databases you need to backup. You no longer have to define specific backup settings in RDS or DynamoDB, or schedule EBS snapshots—this is done automatically by AWS backup.
Amazon S3 provides several storage tiers, which allow you to move data that is used less frequently to cost-effective cold storage. Within S3, you can configure lifecycle policies that automatically move data sets to a cheaper storage class, or delete them altogether, based on predefined criteria.
AWS Backup lets you do this centrally as part of a backup plan. When you define backups, you can specify what happens to your backups after several weeks, months or years—you can automatically define an S3 lifecycle policy to move the data to cold storage or delete it when it is no longer needed.
AWS Backup is priced based on the storage space consumed by your backups. The first time you perform a backup of a data resource, you pay for the full storage space, but from the second backup onwards, you pay only for the storage space added since the last backup.
If you backup an AWS-based data resource, pricing is as follows (prices are for US East Region, and may change from time to time, see the official pricing page):
Amazon EFS File System Backup—$0.05 per GB/month
Amazon EBS Volume Snapshot or AWS Storage Gateway Volume Backup—0.05 per GB/Month
Amazon RDS Database Snapshot—$0.095 per GB/Month
Amazon DynamoDB Table Backup—$0.10 per GB/Month
The above prices are for warm storage. AWS Backup only supports cold storage for Amazon EFS backups, at a significantly reduced price of $0.01 per GB/month.
Restoring backups is free for EBS, RDS, and Storage Gateway. The following services incur a cost for restoring backups (pricing is for US East Region and may change from time to time):
Amazon EFS —$0.02 per GB for warm storage and $0.03 for cold storage.
Amazon DynamoDB —$0.15 per GB
AWS Backup with Cloud Backup NetApp understands ONTAP better than anyone else, which is why the best backup solution for ONTAP systems is NetApp Cloud Backup. Designed by NetApp specifically for ONTAP, Cloud Backup automatically creates block-level incremental forever backups. These copies are stored in object format and preserve all ONTAP’s storage efficiencies. Your backups are 100X faster to create, easy to restore, and much more reliable than with any other solution.
Cloud Backup simplifies the entire backup process. It’s intuitive, quick to deploy, and managed from the same console as the rest of the NetApp cloud ecosystem. Whether you’re looking for a less expensive way to store your backups, a faster, more capable technology than NDMP, or an easy way to enable a 3-2-1 strategy, Cloud Backup offers the best backup solution for ONTAP.
AWS backup is a substantial expense and a major operational burden for many organizations. Read our additional articles below to learn how to control your costs, automate backups, and leverage NetApp technologies to execute hybrid cloud strategies and gain major storage efficiencies.
AWS backup pricing is based on the amount of storage your backups use, and the volume of data you restore when needed.
Data storage is priced per GB-month for backup storage, with two storage tiers for backup data: warm storage and cold storage. In addition, Amazon charges per GB transferred out of storage, with prices depending on the transfer destination. Learn about AWS Backup pricing and see examples of common pricing scenarios.
Read more: Understanding AWS Backup Pricing
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