On July 12th Amazon released “Lifecycle Management for Amazon EBS Snapshots”. You can read about this new service at https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-lifecycle-management-for-amazon-ebs-snapshots/
This new service can be a replacement for the backup functionality that is included with Blumetech’s Managed Services for AWS. The BlumeTech backup service does have features (listed below) that you may not want to lose by switching to the AWS Lifecycle Management service. Blumetech’s Managed Services does also provide monitoring and AWS related operational automation.
Below are some important differences between Blumetech’s backup service and Amazon’s.
First, Blumetech's can take snapshots of EBS volumes as often as every hour (and even more frequently upon request). Amazon's service can only snapshot every 12 hours. Therefore, with Amazon's service in the event a restore is needed, you could lose up to 12 hours worth of data. Blumetech believes that this is an unacceptable data loss for mission critical applications.
Second, Amazon's service does not offer a "default" catch-all backup option. When setting up a lifecycle rule you must specify the specific volumes by tag that you want to back-up. Blumetech services works in two very different ways. First our backups focus on the instance/server itself. We believe that this is the logical unit that customers care about and not EBS volumes. With Amazon's service you need to tag EBS Volumes and not servers. This forces you to tag all EBS volumes, which will probably be significantly more than the number of servers. Second, Blumetech has a default backup rule that ensures that even if no tags are applied to server it will always get backed up. Our experience has been that people naturally forget to tag their instances. With Amazon's service this would lead to the server not being backed up. With Blumetech, even without any tags we ensure that every server is backed up.
Third, Blumetech adds critical tags to the EBS snapshot that enable faster more reliable restores. Our snapshots include the source instance_id, the source instance name, the source instance description, and finally the device name. The device name is used to attach the volume to the instance at the correct location.
Having managed our service for many years, we know that all of these tags are critical to restoring an EBS volume. To do a restore you need to easily find all of the snapshots for a particular server. And then restore the volumes ensuring that the volume is mounted in the same exact place (device_name). For example, if you had a server with 5 attached volumes, when doing a restore of the server, those 5 volumes need to mounted to the server in the SAME EXACT ORDER. If the order is different, then the server won’t restore. With 5 volumes, there are 120 different combinations to try before you land on the right one.
We also copy all the tags from the source volume to the EBS snapshot. If you have tags specified on your EBS volumes for any type of management, e.g. cost accounting, automation, etc., these tags are propagated automatically for you to the snapshot. Amazon’s service does not propagate tags from the original volume to the snapshot.
Fourth, Blumetech automatically monitors our snapshot process. As a fully managed service we ensure that our customer’s snapshots are occurring and will take steps automatically to rectify issues. Amazon’s solution moves the monitoring and support burden back to the customer.
Regardless of Amazon’s shortcomings, their service is free to their customers.
With that said we are dropping our price by 25% for Blumetech’s Managed Services fees for all customers starting August 1st.
If a customer chooses to migrate their EBS backup operations from Blumetech to Amazon that customer will get an additional 25% reduction from their current Blumetech Managed Services cost for a total reduction of 50% from today’s rate. The new discounted fee corresponds to the remaining Blumetech Managed Services, i.e. monitoring and AWS automation. Please note that the missing snapshot functionality mentioned above with Amazon’s service will still apply.
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