New Training: Working with Amazon RDS Backups

In this 6-video skill, CBT Nuggets trainer Bart Castle discusses backup and recovery options and processes for Amazon RDS databases. Gain an understanding of how to create and restore snapshots as well as how to use DNS to swap traffic between RDS instances. Watch this new AWS training.

Watch the full course: Amazon Relational Database Service

This training includes:

• 6 videos

• 1.2 hours of training

You’ll learn these topics in this skill:

• Working with Amazon RDS Backups

• What are My Backup options with Amazon RDS?

• Deploy phpMyAdmin Lab environment for RDS MySQL

• Creating RDS Snapshots

• Restoring RDS Snapshots

• Transitioning between Instances using DNS

Why You Need Backups for AWS RDS Instances

Even though Amazon handles database management for RDS instances, you should still create your own RDS backups even if that incurs an additional cost. Here's the reason why.

Backups for AWS RDS also serve as snapshots for your databases. An RDS backup doesn't just save the differences between snapshots either. An entire backup of your RDS instance is created.

This means if something happens to your database you can easily restore a past copy, or you can spin up a new instance with a backup and divert traffic to it via DNS. There could be a variety of reasons to do this. For instance, if your IT infrastructure is hit with a crypto-malware attack and your database is infected, it takes little time to restore your data.

AWS provides mechanisms for both automatic and manual backups. Automatic backups should act as a way to keep a constant and steady backup schedule. By delegating responsibilities away from admins, automatic backups ensure that there is always a recovery point available for businesses.

Manual backups are a great option for developers. For instance, if programmers need to update a database for some reason, they can make a manual backup of their database first. This gives developers a way to restore data to the earliest possible point before an upgrade should something go wrong, a way to refresh data or a mechanism for cloning a database for application testing and staging.

At the end of the day, creating and storing RDS backups is well worth the extra costs. Unlike EC2 snapshots, RDS backups do have certain limitations, though. So, you'll need to fully understand how backups work with AWS RDS to be able to fully utilize them well.