With the explosive growth of AWS, more and more people are turning to Amazon RDS (Amazon Relational Database Service) for database services. With Amazon RDS instances, you can deploy databases without having any of the overhead of managing the actual database service or underlying operating system. This is what AWS says about Amazon RDS:
Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a web service that makes it easier to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the AWS Cloud. It provides cost-efficient, resizable capacity for an industry-standard relational database and manages common database administration tasks.
Now, because of this growth in Amazon RDS, a new challenge faces consumers of this service. How do I protect my data contained within these database instances? AWS provides capabilities to snapshot the databases, but managing these can be complicated when you consider data retention periods and copying and replicating to other regions or AWS accounts.
Veeam Backup for AWS provides the capabilities to protect and replicate Amazon RDS instances, not only by taking snapshots, but also by replicating instances to other AWS accounts and regions. This provides secure data protection for those RDS instances and allows consumers to implement an AWS best practice of storing backup data in separate AWS accounts.
Backing up your RDS instance
It is extremely easy to get started. Under Policies, pick the resource type you want to protect, which in this instance is RDS, and click Add a policy. You will be presented with the policy creation wizard which has some requirements for configuration:
- Sources (where and what to protect)
- Targets (where and how to replicate)
- Schedule (how often and retention periods)
- Cost estimation (confirm your happy with the cost of this backup)
Once set up, your RDS instance(s) will be protected and replicated, and all snapshots will be managed under the configured retention periods, providing the capabilities to meet data certification requirements.
Restoring your RDS instance
Restoring a database is just as easy. By selecting protected data, you can choose to restore the database in-place by overwriting the existing database, or to a different location including another AWS account.
Whether you’re new to Amazon RDS or already protecting it using manual snapshot capabilities, I strongly suggest trying out Veeam Backup for AWS to see how easy it is to protect your databases. In true Veeam style, we let you backup 10 AWS instances for FREE with no time limits. That includes Amazon RDS, regardless of how big the database is. Protect away!