Databases on Mysterious Code - Senior AWS, DevOps & security engineering

Cross-region RDS recovery: encryption and Aurora support

Sat, 03 Feb 2018 00:45:22 +0000

After my previous post about a complete code for automated RDS cross-region backup copy, some issues and new feature requests have been raised on GitHub (thanks for that!) - and with your help, support for encrypted RDS instances and Aurora Clusters have now been added!

Complete code: cross-region RDS recovery

Thu, 28 Dec 2017 00:12:46 +0000

After posting the previous post on this topic (Copying RDS snapshot to another region for cross-region recovery) , I noticed a lot of people being interested in using the code I provided as an example. Many were not sure how to make use of it, and after a couple of pull requests it became obvious that a complete, fully-working code and CloudFormation template would be a good idea. So, yesterday, I pushed an update to aws-maintenance repository with a fully working code, which you can easily customize via CloudFormation parameters to match your needs.

How to tag Redshift clusters (and others) in one place in AWS Console

Fri, 03 Feb 2017 10:00:18 +0000

Management page of Redshift in AWS Console does not currently allow you to add or modify tags on your clusters. That doesn’t mean that Redshift resources cannot be tagged - almost everything from clusters to parameters groups can be tagged through the Tag Editor.

Adding more nodes to Redshift cluster doesn't always mean you get more space

Fri, 13 Jan 2017 17:33:03 +0000

AWS Redshift is a big data storage (“data warehousing”) solution for analytics. Based on PostgreSQL 8, it can combine up to 128 largest nodes, giving you 2 petabytes for your data. Well, almost. You don’t get ALL that for your data.

Copying RDS snapshot to another region for cross-region recovery

Fri, 21 Oct 2016 10:00:17 +0000

For an updated ready-to-use CloudFormation template of this code, see newer post: Complete code: cross-region RDS recovery .

Amazon RDS is a great database-as-a-service, which takes care of almost all database-related maintenance tasks for you - everything from automated backups and patching to replication and fail-overs into another availability zones.

Unfortunately all of this fails if the region where your RDS is hosted fails. Region-wide failures are very rare, but they do happen! RDS does not support cross-region replication at the moment, so you cannot simply create a replica of your database in another region (unless you host the database on an EC2 instance and set up the replication yourself). The second-best option, to make sure you can restore your service quickly in another region, is to always have a copy of your latest database backup in that region. In case of RDS, that can mean copying automated snapshots. There is no option for AWS to do it automatically, but it can be easily scripted with AWS Lambda functions.