Databases tend to host the most critical data your business has. From orders, customers, products and even employee information – it’s everything that your business depends on. How much of that can you afford to lose?
With AWS you have options for database recovery depending on your budget and Recovery Time Objective (RTO).
Low budget/Long RTO
- Whether you are in the cloud or on premise, using the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) tools you can script uploads of your database backups directly to S3. This can be added as a step to an existing backup job or an entirely new job.
- Another option would be to use a third party tool to mount an S3 bucket as a drive. It’s possible to backup directly to the S3 bucket, but if you have write issues you may need to write the backup locally and then move it to the mounted drive.
These methods have a longer RTO as they will require you to stand up a new DB server and then restore the backups, but is a low cost solution to ensure you can recover your business.
The catch here is that you can only restore to the last backup that you have taken and copied to S3. You may want to review you backup plans to ensure you are comfortable with what you may lose. Just make sure you use the native S3 lifecycle policies to purge old backups otherwise your storage bill will slowly get out of hand.
High budget/short RTO
- Almost all mainstream Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) have a native method of replication. You can setup an EC2 Instance database server to replicate your database to. This can be in real-time so that you can be positive that you will not lose a single transaction.
- What about RDS? While you cannot use native RDBMS replication there are third party replication tools that will do Change Data Capture (CDC) replication directly to RDS. These can be easier to setup than the native replication methods, but you will want to make sure you are monitoring these tools to ensure that you do not get into a situation where you can lose transactional data.
Since this is DR you can lower the cost of these solutions by downsizing the RDS or EC2 instance. This will increase the RTO as you will need to manually resize the instances in the event of failure, but can be a significant cost saver. Both of these solutions will require connectivity to the instance over VPN or Direct Connect.
Another benefit of this solution is that it can easily be utilized for QA, Testing and development needs. You can easily snapshot the RDS or EC2 instance and stand up a new one to work against. When you are done – just terminate it.
With all database DR solutions, make sure you script out the permissions & server configurations. This either needs to be saved off with the backups or applied to RDS/EC2 instances. These are constantly changing and can create recovery issues if you do not account for them.
With an AWS database recovery plan you can avoid losing critical business data.
-Mike Izumi, Cloud Architect
