AWS Adds Support for Tagging Amazon EBS Snapshots Upon Creation and Resource-Level Permissions

0 Steven Duff Amazon Web Services, Cost management, Snapshot Management

In previous blogs, we have explained why properly tagging AWS resources is necessary, and we have explored some of best practices and recommended strategies for applying tags for your AWS cloud environment. Amazon Web Services have now taken this further and provided some great new support features for tagging Amazon EBS Snapshots so you can exercise more control them. You can now tag your Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) Snapshots at the time of creation. You can do this from the Amazon EC2 console or through the CreateSnapshot API. By tagging resources at the time of creation, you can eliminate the need to run custom tagging scripts after resource creation.

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What are the best practices for AWS Disaster Recovery planning?

0 Steven Duff Amazon Web Services, Disaster Recovery

Ensuring business continuity in the face of a man-made or natural disaster may seem like a daunting task. Luckily, today’s cloud-based computing platforms such as Amazon Web Services are particularly well suited to meet the disaster recovery planning needs of most businesses. However, the versatile, decentralized nature of the cloud is wasted in the absence of a proper, well tested DR plan and the ability to adapt to changing often unforeseen circumstances. So in the following article, we’ll take a look at some best practices for utilizing AWS cloud to develop your own DR plan in order to help maintain business continuity during a disaster situation.

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How to significantly reduce AWS costs with EC2 instance scheduling

0 Steven Duff Amazon Web Services, Cost management, Scheduling, Server Management

Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) provides its users with a flexible, highly customizable computing solution without the need to invest in costly on-site servers. And the product’s ability to quickly scale computing capacity up or down means that, if properly utilized, users only pay for what they actually need.  Not only can Amazon EC2 users easily start and stop instances on demand through the AWS console, but you can also use EC2 server scheduling to set the stop and start times of specific instances in advance, to reduce AWS costs. By some estimates, utilizing EC2 scheduling functionality to stop non-essential instances outside of office hours can reduce AWS costs by as much as 70 percent! Imagine how impressed your boss will be!

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The importance of regularly testing your AWS DR strategy

0 Steven Duff Amazon Web Services, Automation, Backups, Disaster Recovery

Businesses are now using AWS cloud to enable faster disaster recovery of their critical IT applications without incurring the additional costs of on-premise infrastructure. One of the many benefits of AWS cloud is that it supports a number of disaster recovery scenarios from “pilot light”, to “hot standby”. AWS cloud offers a range of cloud-based disaster recovery services that enable the rapid recovery of your IT infrastructure and data. In this article, we will explain what you need to consider when planning your AWS DR strategy, including the frequency of testing, the types of backups you are going to require and explain how CloudRanger can help to improve your AWS DR strategy with automated testing.
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What are the advantages and capabilities of Amazon Aurora Serverless?

0 Steven Duff Amazon Web Services, Databases

One of the main advantages of using Amazon Web Services instead of hosting a physical IT infrastructure is the ability to quickly and easily scale various services up or down as needed. While this cost-saving feature has long been available for Amazon’s relational databases engine, Amazon Aurora, a real-time, completely automated scaling process will soon be an option thanks to AWS’s new product, Amazon Aurora Serverless.   

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