Chapter 14: Backup and Restore

We covered a high-level view of how backups work in AWS in earlier chapters, covering the different database technologies, but in this chapter, we will assess backup and recovery techniques and the use of specific AWS tools, such as AWS Backup. The aim of this chapter is to learn how you gather backup and restore requirements for your applications and then how to create appropriate recovery plans to meet those needs. We will then learn how to create those plans using AWS Backup and finish with a hands-on lab to use those skills in practice.

In this chapter, we're going to cover the following main topics:

• Understanding Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
• Working with maintenance windows
• Creating backup plans with AWS Backup

Technical requirements

You will require an AWS account with root access; not everything we will do in this chapter may be available in Free Tier, which means it may cost you a small amount to follow the hands-on sections. You will also require access to the AWS Command-Line Interface (CLI). The AWS guide at https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/cli-chap-configure.html explains the steps required, but I will summarize them here:

1. Create an AWS account if you have not already done so.
2. Download the latest version of the AWS CLI from here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/welcome-versions.html#welcome-versions-v2.
3. Create an admin user: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/id_credentials_access-keys.html.
4. Create an access key for your administration user: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/getting-started_create-admin-group.html#getting-started_create-admin-group-cli.
5. Run the aws configure command to set up a profile...

Understanding RTO and RPO

There are two critical terms we need to understand when it comes to backup and recovery, RTO and RPO. These two terms are used to help understand the requirements for a business in terms of the speed of recovery required in case of a failure and how much data could be lost in a worst-case scenario. Correct use of these two values will allow you to ensure your backup and recovery strategy meets these requirements.

Let's first look at RTO.

RTO

RTO is the maximum amount of time a system can be unavailable before the impact to the business becomes too severe and a large amount of damage is done. The damage could be financial, legal, or reputational. With RTO, we are focusing on how quickly the database will be returned to a usable state, and depending on the type of failure, we may end up with different RTO values. For example, imagine that you have a Multi-AZ RDS instance. Your primary database suffers a failure due to an underlying network issue...

Working with maintenance windows

All of the AWS-managed database services offer a maintenance window that can be defined by the customer. A maintenance window is a weekly timeslot when AWS is authorized to carry out patching work or other tasks that may cause an outage of your database. These outages will always be communicated in advance, but they cannot always be avoided. There is another window that will be created for a daily backup on RDS. AWS will assign a random maintenance window when you create a managed database. As a result, it is critical that the maintenance and backup windows are set for the quietest time for your application to avoid an unexpected outage or performance issue due to a backup running during peak hours.

You can modify the windows during and after the creation of a managed database.

You can also control the backup times and patterns using AWS Backup, which we will learn next.

Creating backup plans with AWS Backup

AWS Backup is a backup scheduling and storage tool for a wide range of AWS services, including RDS, DocumentDB, Neptune, and DynamoDB. AWS Backup allows you to create centralized and standardized backup policies to ensure compliance with an organization's RTO and RPO requirements and to simplify the control of backups and recoveries across an entire AWS account. AWS Backup can also be configured to back up on-premises resources by using a gateway, but this can only be used to back up virtual machines and servers rather than initializing a database-level backup. AWS backups are stored in a backup vault to protect them from unauthorized access.

AWS Backup allows you to define a large number of policies to meet your needs; these include the following:

• Backup intervals – how often do you want a backup to be taken and what type? For databases, this could be a full backup or a continuous backup.
• Data retention – you...

Summary

In this chapter, we have explored several backup and recovery technologies and philosophies, such as RTO and RPO, the use of maintenance windows. We learned how we can use AWS Backup to create backup policies and rules that can be applied across all of our databases to ensure consistency and adherence to required data retention policies.

The AWS Certified Database – Specialty exam will ask questions about the required configuration to meet a specific RTO/RPO need, and you will need to know the recovery times offered for different databases, specifically RDS and DynamoDB. In the next chapter, we will learn about troubleshooting tools and techniques you can use to resolve issues on your AWS database.

Cheat sheet

This cheat sheet summarizes the key points from this chapter:

• RPO is the maximum amount of data a company can lose without sustaining major damage.
• RTO is the maximum amount of time a system can be unavailable without sustaining major damage.
• RPO and RTO need to be considered together to define a backup and recovery strategy.
• A recovery strategy can include backups, standby databases, read replicas, and manual scripts.
• AWS Backup allows you to create centralized backup policies and plans to ensure that all your databases will meet your RTOs and RPOs.
• AWS-managed databases offer maintenance windows that can be configured by the user to control the times that patching or other tasks that may cause a service disruption can run.
• RDS daily backups run during a backup window, which should be set during the least busy times for the application to avoid performance impact.

Review

Let's now practice a few exam-style questions:

1. End users of an application are complaining that they are experiencing intermittent performance issues with RDS for MySQL. After investigation, a database specialist determines that the performance issues occur during the automated backup window. What actions can the specialist perform to improve backup performance? (Select two.)
   1. Schedule an automated backup window to occur outside of peak hours.
   2. Increase the instance class.
   3. Create backups from a read replica.
   4. Increase the number of shards.
   5. Increase the storage on the RDS instance.
   6. Change the storage to provisioned Input/Output Operations per Second (IOPS).
2. Your company has a policy that requires all RDS backups to occur automatically on a specified schedule and be stored for 90 days. What is the optimal solution to meet this requirement?
   1. Create an AWS Backup policy for all RDS databases to include automated backups on RDS. Configure the data retention period to 90 days...

Further reading

To understand the concepts of this chapter in further detail, refer to the AWS Backup guide: https://aws.amazon.com/backup/.