Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager now automates archival of EBS Snapshots
In November 2021, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) introduced EBS Snapshots Archive, a new tier for EBS Snapshots that can help you save up to 75% on storage costs for EBS Snapshots that you intend to retain for more than 90 days and rarely access. Today, we are announcing that you can use Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager to automatically move snapshots created by Data Lifecycle Manager to EBS Snapshots Archive, further reducing the need to manage complex custom scripts and the risk of having unattended storage costs.
In November 2021, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) introduced EBS Snapshots Archive, a new tier for EBS Snapshots that can help you save up to 75% on storage costs for EBS Snapshots that you intend to retain for more than 90 days and rarely access. Today, we are announcing that you can use Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager to automatically move snapshots created by Data Lifecycle Manager to EBS Snapshots Archive, further reducing the need to manage complex custom scripts and the risk of having unattended storage costs.
Snapshots are incremental, storing only the changes since the last snapshot and making them cost effective for daily and weekly backups that need to be accessed frequently. You might also have snapshots that you access every few months or years and do not need fast access to data, such as snapshots that need to be retained long-term for regulatory reasons. For such use cases, you can now use EBS Snapshots Archive to store full, point-in-time snapshots at a storage cost of $0.0125/GB-month in the US East (N. Virginia) Region.
Rather than creating and managing your own custom scripts to move snapshots from standard to the archive tier, you can now create Data Lifecycle Manager policies to do this at no additional cost. You can setup the policies to create and keep snapshots in the standard tier in case they need to be quickly restored into volumes. After a period of time that you specify, any policies with Snapshot Archive enabled will automatically move the snapshots to the archive tier. Finally, Data Lifecycle Manager will automatically delete the snapshots at the end of its retention.
To learn more about automating EBS Snapshots Archive with Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager, and to evaluate whether it is suitable for your use case, please refer to this blog and the associated technical documentation. This feature is available through the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), AWS SDKs, or the AWS Console in all AWS commercial Regions where EBS Snapshots Archive is available.