This document summarizes a presentation on disaster recovery with AWS cloud. It discusses the need for backup and disaster recovery given examples of natural disasters. It then covers different backup and disaster recovery options on AWS like S3, EBS, and Glacier storage. It also provides lessons around ensuring backups are accessible, scalable, safe, work with your DR policy and are properly managed. Finally, it discusses a customer case study of how a engineering company implemented a "pilot light" DR strategy on AWS after their office was flooded.

1. 2013 AWS WWPS Summit
Canberra, Australia
Disaster Recovery with the AWS Cloud
Dean Samuels
Solutions Architect, AWS

2. 2013 AWS WWPS Summit,
Canberra – May 23
Agenda
• Prologue The need for Backup and DR
• Lessons Backup and DR with AWS
• Customer Reference Ausenco

3. The need for Backup and DR

4. 2013 AWS WWPS Summit,
Canberra – May 23
Some natural examples….
after Brisbane Floods – January 13th 2011Coronation Drive, Milton, QLD.…
Photos: http://www.abc.net.au/news/specials/qld-floods/

5. 2013 AWS WWPS Summit,
Canberra – May 23
Some natural examples….
Christchurch Earthquake - Feb 22nd 2011Manchester & Glouchester Street, Christchurch....
Photos: http://www.abc.net.au/news/specials/christchurch-quake/

6. 2013 AWS WWPS Summit,
Canberra – May 23
Some natural examples….
after Hurricane Sandy – October 29th 2012Breezy Point, Queens, NY, USA.…
Photos: http://www.abc.net.au/news/specials/hurricane-sandy-before-after-photos/

7. 2013 AWS WWPS Summit,
Canberra – May 23
What about human-made examples….
“Everything fails, all the time”
Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon.com

8. Backup and DR with AWS
Backup and DR Lessons

9. 2013 AWS WWPS Summit,
Canberra – May 23
Business and Technical Drivers….
Reduce costs
Slash DR budgets by up to 50%
Consolidate sites
Eliminate the need to run a
secondary site
Reduce on-premise
Eliminate 30%+ of on-premise
physical equipment
Remove aging
technologies
Eliminate tape for backup and
archive

10. The fundamental economic model…
Utility, on-demand datacenter
Primary Site
Routers
Firewalls
Network
Application Licenses
Operating Systems
Hypervisor
Servers
SAN
Primary Storage
Backup
Archive
AWS
Routers
Firewalls
Network
Application Licenses
Operating Systems
Hypervisor
Servers
SAN
Snapshot Storage
Backup
Archive
Secondary
site costs

11. 2013 AWS WWPS Summit,
Canberra – May 23
You can have different DR solutions
• Easy to integrate existing vendors with DR on AWS
• Approach: One vendor/hybrid/multiple vendors
• One region/multi-regions (if you need geo-diversity)
• Different DR Architectures
Backup & Restore Pilot light
Warm standby in
AWS
Multi-site solution
in AWS & on-
premise

12. Each set of IT assets will have different requirements…
DR & business continuity
Recovery Time
Objective (RTO)
How quickly you need this asset to be
recovered?
e.g. 1min? 15min? 1hr? 4hrs? 1day?
Recovery Point
Objective (RPO)
How ‘fresh’ the recovery must be for the
asset?
e.g. zero data loss, 15mins out of date?

13. Assets will sit on a spectrum of technical complexity…
DR & business continuity
Rebuild when
required from
offsite backup
Run hot-hot
configuration with
auto-failover

14. Backup and DR with AWS
Backup and Storage options

15. Simple Storage Service
Highly scalable object storage
1 byte to 5TB in size
99.999999999% durability
Elastic Block Store
High performance block storage device
1GB to 1TB in size
Mount as drives to instances with
snapshot/cloning functionalities
Glacier
Long term object archive
Extremely low cost per gigabyte
99.999999999% durability
Storage Options
Very fast
‘instance’ disks
Slow, rare accessFast web object
storage

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Canberra – May 23
Cost
($/GB/month)
Performance Durability
Amazon S3 0.095  
Amazon Glacier 0.01  
AWS Storage
Gateway
0.095
(+ 125/GW)
 
Amazon EBS 0.10  
Amazon EBS
(PIOPS)
0.125  
*AWS Oregon pricing
Storage Options

17. 2013 AWS WWPS Summit,
Canberra – May 23
1. My backup should be accessible
2. My backup should be able to scale
3. My backup should be safe
4. My backup should work with a DR policy
5. Someone should care about it
Backup Lessons

18. VPN
Public / AWS Direct Connect
AWS Import/Export
Backup Lessons – My backup should be accessible

19. GW-Cached volumes
GW-stored volumes
“Cool” storage
“Cold”
Backup Lessons – My backup should be accessible

20. Storage Gateway – Connect On-Prem with the AWS Cloud
1. Local, low-latency access to
the most frequently used files
while storing all data in Amazon
S3 (Cached-Volumes)
Or
2. Scheduled off-site backups to
Amazon S3 for on-premises data
(Stored-Volumes)

21. 2013 AWS WWPS Summit,
Canberra – May 23
Access both via SDKs and via third-party software
S3 Glacier
Internet Web
Services API
HTTP(S)
Via SDK Via 3rd parties

22. 2013 AWS WWPS Summit,
Canberra – May 23
• “Infinite” scale with Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier
• Scale to multiple regions
• Seamless
• No need to provision
• Cost tiers (cheaper at scale)
Backup Lessons – My backup should be able to scale

23. 2013 AWS WWPS Summit,
Canberra – May 23
• SSL Endpoints (Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier)
• Signed API calls
• Store encrypted files
• Server-side encryption
• Multiple copies across different data centers
• Local/cloud with AWS Storage Gateway
Backup Lessons – My backup should be safe

24. 2013 AWS WWPS Summit,
Canberra – May 23
• Easy to integrate within AWS or Hybrid
• AWS Storage Gateway: Run services on Amazon EC2 (DR)
• Clear costs
• Reduced costs
• I decide redundancy/availability in relation to costs
Backup Lessons – My backup should work with a DR policy

25. Backup Lessons – My backup should work with a DR policy

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Canberra – May 23
• Clear ownership
• Permissions with IAM: Users, groups  roles
• Logs
• AWS support
Backup Lessons – Someone should care about it

27. Pilot light
Stopped
instances

28. Pilot light
Running
instances

29. Backup and DR with AWS
A “Pilot Light” reference…

30. Remember Brisbane, QLD…..
Source: http://www.abc.net.au/news/specials/qld-floods/

31. Brisbane - January 13th 2011
Ausenco
Source: http://www.abc.net.au/news/specials/qld-floods/

32. • ASX200 company
• Head office in Brisbane
• 29 Offices in 19 countries
• 3500 Employees
Ausenco Offices

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Canberra – May 23
The Result
• Low effort
• Incremental rollout
• Cloud migration
• Efficient, effective usage of bandwidth
• Application/database servers
• Regionalised deployment

34. Backup and DR with AWS
A new HA/DR continuum…

35. With the cloud the HA/DR continuum changes…
DR with High Availability

36. 2013 AWS WWPS Summit,
Canberra – May 23
With the cloud the HA/DR continuum changes…Testing your DR
• Dev/test in the cloud is super easy
• Spin up capacity only for the test
• Regularly test your DR
• Cost is minimal
• What about data transfer speed?

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Canberra – May 23
Reducing Costs
• AWS cost reduction (e.g, S3 cost reduction on Apr 2nd 2013)
• Reduced redundancy (Amazon S3)
• Retention policy
• Hot/warm/cool/cold backup
• Reserved capacity/tiers
0–1 TB 0.095 0.076
1–50 TB 0.080 0.064
50–500 TB 0.070 0.056
500–1,000 TB 0.065 0.052
1–5 PB 0.060 0.048
5+ PB 0.055 0.037
Amazon S3
Standard
$/GB/Month
Reduced
$/GB/Month
34
Price
Reductions

38. 2013 AWS WWPS Summit
Canberra, Australia