AWS backup and recovery – latest release

Veeam has just released version 5 of its AWS-native backup and recovery solution: Veeam Backup for AWS. Veeam is continually adding new capabilities to provide AWS users the ability to natively protect their AWS workloads and help deliver on the promise of not only cloud-native data protection, but also offer a better way to protect, control and manage data in a hybrid and multi-cloud world.

Veeam Backup for AWS is a cloud-native backup solution that delivers enterprise-grade backup consistency to the AWS public cloud, focused on simplicity, savings and security. Packed full of features and capabilities, Veeam Backup for AWS can be leveraged as a standalone solution for backup and recovery of AWS in AWS, or as part of Veeam Backup & Replication for hybrid and multi-cloud organizations.

Veeam Backup for AWS v5 comes with heaps of new features and functionality, however, for this blog, I will be focusing on the biggest four.

Amazon Aurora backup and recovery

With Veeam Backup for AWS, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) support has been included for quite some time now, however, with V5, customers now have the ability to automate snapshots being taken of any Amazon Aurora databases. With the inclusion of Amazon Aurora support, snapshots can now be taken and replicated across AWS regions and accounts. Restores of databases are also extremely quick and can be restored to overwrite existing databases, or be restored into new AWS regions and accounts.

Veeam Backup for AWS v5 rounds out full support for all six fully-managed, relational database types on AWS, including:

• Amazon Aurora
• MariaDB
• Microsoft SQL Server
• MySQL
• Oracle
• PostgreSQL

You can protect any Amazon RDS type by creating a new policy using the simple and intuitive wizard. Databases included within the policy can be defined by picking the individual database or databases, or by using AWS tags. Restores can be completed in the same, wizard-driven way — pick the database to restore, restore point and location, and you’re done.

Amazon EFS file indexing

With support for Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) being added in the previous version, it only made sense to bring some new enhancements this time around. Veeam Backup for AWS v5 now includes file-level indexing to improve granular recovery capabilities. File-level recovery allows someone to restore individual files through a Veeam Explorer-like interface, easily browsing, searching and selecting individual files and folders to be restored. With this granular recovery capability, it is no longer required to restore a whole file system volume.

Configuration backup and recovery

As the use of Veeam Backup for AWS scales, making sure that the configuration of the appliance itself is protected and recoverable is also critical. With Veeam Backup for AWS v5, you can back up all the configuration settings, including items like polices, and recover them in the event of accidental deletion, disaster, migration and more.

Let’s take a look at this in the UI.

By selecting configuration backup from the settings, you are able to set up a schedule so that regular backups are taken, as well as perform restores from either the latest or past restore points. Choosing to restore opens up the configuration restore wizard which allows you to also import previous backups from other environments.

New dashboard

Veeam Backup for AWS v5 also has a completely redesigned dashboard to help users understand the environment that they are protecting.

With the new dashboard, you can see at a glance how the environment is operating. Giving granular information on the number of snapshots created, how much storage is being used, and how many protected workloads there are. This is a great insight into understanding what is being protected, and what errors (if any) there may be.

Summary

This new release is bringing more enterprise-grade capabilities to customers who need Modern Data Protection for workloads in the cloud. With capabilities to protect a wide range of services in AWS, including Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (Amazon EC2), Amazon RDS, Amazon EFS volumes and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) configuration backups, Veeam Backup for AWS is a powerful choice for any enterprise or developer using AWS. For existing Veeam users who are finding themselves living in a hybrid or multi-cloud environment, these same capabilities are available in Veeam Backup & Replication.