Items tagged with 'Amazon'

Making use of Amazon for our server hosting gives us access to a host of neat features that allow us to do good stuff with our server environments.

We make use of a feature in Amazon called EBS (Elastic Block Store), you can think of it like a hard drive that exists on the network. While it is true there has been a lot of doom and gloom surrounding the EBS devices (http://aws.amazon.com/message/65648/) they can give you some advantages if you are careful how you use them.

One of those advantages is the ability to create snapshots and then create new EBS volumes based on those snapshots. Snapshots are quite quick to take, get saved in S3 (Amazons Simple Storage Service) and protect the data for long term durability. Using these techniques you could quickly copy data from one environment to another, for example from your production to staging environments. Or while snapshots are *not* a backup solution, you could snapshot a volume, create a new volume from the snapshot, attach it to a machine and take a backup from that volume. Allowing you to backup from a certain point of time without affecting the running of the main server (of course depending on your applications and technologies this may not be appropriate and you might need to take extra steps to ensure you got a consistent data backup).

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