Over the years “DevOps” has become quite the buzzword. It’s been used to describe culture changes, automation, change management, continuous delivery… essentially, a culture where dev and ops collaborate to build a faster, more reliable release pipeline.

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.

Software configuration management (SCM) is a set of processes, policies, and tools that organize the development process. The goal of SCM is to improve the speed of and quality by catching errors early and enabling quick fixes when they occur. Understand how to define SCM and discuss how to accomplish it.

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.

The AWS Elastic Beanstalk Console currently allows you to change between minor platform versions (e.g. from 2017.09 v2.6.1 running PHP 7.0 to 2017.09 v2.6.2 running PHP 7.0), but doesn’t support changes between major versions (e.g. from 2017.09 v2.6.2 running PHP 7.0 to 2017.09 v2.6.2 running PHP 7.1).

Deploying an application can be an overwhelming process. Get our step-by-step application deployment process and checklist to make this daunting task a little more manageable.

We’ve been hard at work for over 15 years building software to help you collaborate better. But if you work on an IT or customer support team, you know it takes more than the right software to build a culture of collaboration between your service teams and dev teams. You also need to have a set of best practices to help you use your collaboration tools to their fullest potential.