AWS Tip of the Month: Backup Server for less than $1 a month

AWS has a very neat way to backup your server with attached storage called EBS Snapshots.  This technology starts with a full snapshot of the entire volume and continues to do incremental snapshots based on the difference between the last snapshots.

Snap shotting is not a new technology, and many people use this in their on-premise environment to take snapshots of a virtual machine or specific disk for backup or copy purposes.

At AWS you cannot schedule these snapshots. You either have to call these via API or use the management console to do this.

Below is the high-level process to automate these snapshot backups at a particular time each day:

1. Build a t1.micro that has a script to run that calls the snapshot API for EBS for the volumes you want to backup.  Make sure this script runs on machine start up.
2. Setup an Auto-scale group to launch a server based on a schedule (we start ours at 3am and shut it off at 3:50 am).  This ensures time to kick off all the snapshot jobs - note: I do not have to run the server while they complete, only to kick off the snapshot and any pre-activities I need to accomplish before I can take my backup.
3. Check your snapshots to ensure they are occurring regularly and test them on a monthly or quarterly basis to ensure you can recover sufficiently in the case of an outage.

By doing this daily we have incurred the costs of our storage for snapshots and the $.02 an hour charge for our T1.micro - effectively $0.62 per month for a backup server.

-Kris

Radio Interview Recording

On Thursday I was interviewed on local business radio KSBN on the Spokane Entreprenuer Show. My friends Bill Kalivas and Catherine Greer hosted a 30 minute spot on our business and what it took to get things going.

Click here to listen to the recording of the show.

-Kris

AWS Tip of the Month - Super fast Micro instance installs for less than a buck

Here is an easy but effective tip for managing micro instances in AWS.

Micro instances can be a challenge to install software or do application build upgrades due to the limited amount of CPU given to this instance size. Micro instances can make fantastic web servers, but when you need to do work on the server it can take more time than the typical IT pro has patience for.

Here is a quick tip: Change the instance size for patching and installs.

1) Stop the micro instance for your maintenance or install work.
2) Change the instance size to Large (or X-Large if you need a huge box for the install).
3) Start the instance
4) Run your install, upgrade, etc. I've found that I can usually do most of my maintenance or installs in less than an hour on a Large instance = $0.52
5) Stop the instance
6) Change the instance size back to Micro
7) Start the instance again.

The starting and stopping take seconds, and the upgrade to Large is instantaneous. Following these steps will lead to pain free patching, installs and upgrades for less than the price of a latte.

-Kris

Gartner Identifies Amazon Web Services as the Leader

In a recent Gartner article, Amazon Web Services has clearly been distinguished as the leader in cloud computing. Gartner did a great job of explaining why AWS is leading the way and why other companies may struggle to keep up with them.

2nd Watch has moved a great deal of companies off the "niche" and "challengers" and will continue to do so as companies realize the value of AWS. If you are currently hosted in a COLO or another provider like GoGrid, the costs and product set cannot match AWS, and this is why we are seeing companies migrating to AWS - even from other cloud providers.



http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-18BC06X&ct=111213&st=sb

Amazon Web Service Webinar

AWS is making it less complicated and less expensive for your company to recover in the event of a disaster. Check out a great webinar that will change your view of how you recover after a disaster! 2nd Watch is highlighted in the webinar.

Cloud Workload - Analytics

If you work at an organization that values data you likely have been asked at one point in time to run a report.  The report you ran likely answered some key business question like how many sales you processed last month or data on your key customer accounts.

What about ad-hoc reporting?  Where did you go when you had a specific question and no pre-built report to answer it?  Some organizations build large Data Warehousing applications that churn data from multiple sources and form what's called a "Cube" or aggregate data store.  This is simply pre-run aggregates (sums, averages, counts, etc.) across large data sets so that querying is faster than trying to search the base data (often millions of rows).  This Cube was something that was built typically on a batch basis (weekly, nightly, hourly) depending on need and technical limitations of the environment.  The IT environment could only afford so large servers to process the massive data to run the data import and analytic jobs.

Sounds like heavy computing.  How could the Cloud help?

One of the unique and very valuable attributes of Cloud Computing is that it is elastic.  This means you can spin up resources when you need them and spin them down when you don't.  I've worked on many data warehouses in my career and most of them are very cyclical in their computing needs.  For 6-12 hours a day (typically at night) the warehouse is churning data as fast as it can to build the aggregate cube for end users to use when they arrive at work in the morning.  The rest of the day the cube queries are light load in comparison as end users query aggregate data.

What if you could increase your compute capacity by 20 fold for those 6-12 hours at night when the data needed to be loaded?  Would that cut down on the window?  Could you load more data?  Could you run more analytics?

What would you do with the cost savings for shutting off the data load servers during the day?  Soon, your CFO will be asking.  What will your answer be?

Learn more @ www.2ndwatch.com

-KB

Workloads for the Cloud

We are going to start posting a series of posts about different workloads that are appropriate for use in the Cloud.

The Cloud is enabling new technology and business workloads that were not possible in the past.

Keep up on the blog for additional posts in the series.

-KB