Function as a service (FaaS) products like AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, and Google Cloud Functions have instigated a paradigm shift in the way Ops teams provision and manage their organization's infrastructure. With everyday administrative tasks like provisioning, patching, maintaining compliance, and configuring operating systems all being abstracted away, your Ops team only has one task to work on - writing world-class code.

This small release introduces custom stages, stage-level configuration overrides, instant rollbacks and a few other refinements for Up the serverless deployment tool.

As you probably know, Site24x7's AWS monitoring capabilities provide complete visibility into resource utilization and performance for key compute resources, storage, and database services powering your application in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. From here on out, you'll have the power to not only identify issues that might affect application performance, but also automatically invoke operational tasks across multiple AWS resources to resolve them quickly.

In our previous posts, I showed you how to copy your DB and Aurora snapshots to ensure they are preserved beyond the lifetime of your RDS instance. However, those copies were simply second copies in the same region as the original. In this post, I’ll show you how to copy your RDS snapshots to a second region for extra protection. Please note that I will restrict this post to unencrypted snapshots. Copying encrypted snapshots is more involved, so I’ll show that in a separate post.

RDS snapshots can be unencrypted or they can be encrypted at rest. Today, best practice is to use encryption-at-rest on your RDS instances and clusters, and to encrypt your RDS snapshots. When you create an RDS snapshot from an RDS instance or cluster, the resulting snapshot will be encrypted if the source instance or cluster is encrypted. But if the source is not encrypted, then your RDS snapshot is not encrypted. When you create an RDS snapshot, you are not given the option to encrypt it.

RDS DB snapshots are snapshots created from Amazon RDS DB instances. Those being MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server. Amazon Aurora also has snapshots, however, those are considered “cluster snapshots” and are handled differently.

If you’re hosting on AWS, you can expect some pretty excellent reliability and availability. If your service isn’t responding, it’s likely an issue with your own code. On the other hand, system outages do happen. They’re usually pretty minor. Sometimes they're not.

As companies, big or small, move into the cloud, it’s becoming more and more important to ensure that data is protected. There are numerous options for data resilience, including (but not limited to), Amazon EBS and Amazon S3. What you choose to use depends on your business requirements. Amazon EBS volumes are supposed to be redundant within an availability zone, however they have been known to fail, both due to technical issues, and by human error.