AWS EBS Backup and Recovery Guide 2025: Snapshots, DLM, and AWS Backup

What’s New in 2025

Key Updates and Changes

• AWS Backup Integration: Centralized backup management with deletion protection
• Enhanced DLM: Cron expressions, multi-schedule policies (up to 4 per policy)
• Cross-Region Automation: Automated snapshot copying across 3 regions
• Incremental Cross-Region: Optimized data transfer for regional copies
• EventBridge Integration: Real-time snapshot event monitoring

Major Improvements

• Snapshot Locking: Prevent accidental deletion with retention locks
• Fast Snapshot Restore: Pre-warm snapshots for instant recovery
• Archive Tier: 75% cost savings for long-term retention
• Recycle Bin: Recover accidentally deleted snapshots
• Tags-Based Automation: Enhanced tag-based lifecycle management

Understanding what AWS provides for backing up EBS volumes is an important concept for DevOps. In 2025, AWS offers multiple sophisticated options for automating and managing backups.

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Most bang for your buck with AWS Elastic Block Store (EBS) in 2025

What’s New in 2025

Key Updates and Changes

• GP3 Now Standard: GP3 volumes offer 20% cost savings over GP2 with independent IOPS/throughput provisioning
• IO2 Block Express: Supports up to 256,000 IOPS and 4,000 MB/s throughput
• Multi-Attach Support: IO2 volumes can now attach to multiple EC2 instances simultaneously
• Enhanced Durability: IO2 offers 99.999% durability vs IO1’s 99.9%
• Elastic Volumes: Modify volume type, size, or performance without downtime

Migration and Cost Optimization

• GP2 to GP3: Save 20% per GB with better baseline performance (3,000 IOPS, 125 MB/s)
• IO1 to IO2: Get 500 IOPS per GB (vs 50 for IO1) at similar pricing
• Volume Modification: Changes typically complete within 6 hours for 1TB volumes

Getting the most bang for your buck with AWS Elastic Block Store (EBS)

Understanding what AWS/EC2 provides for provisioning on-demand storage is critical for DevOps. Companies waste tons by over provisioning AWS. In 2025, with GP3 volumes and IO2 Block Express, there are more opportunities than ever to optimize costs while improving performance.

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Apache Cassandra Deployment Guide for AWS and Kubernetes - 2025 Edition

🚀 What’s New in This 2025 Update

Major Changes Since 2017

• Cassandra 5.0 - ACID transactions, cost-based query optimizer, vector search for AI workloads
• Cloud-Native Deployment - 85% of users now deploy on cloud with Kubernetes operators
• Modern AWS Instances - Graviton (r6g), Im4gn series for better price/performance
• Container Orchestration - Kubernetes operators (Cass Operator, K8ssandra) for automated management
• Advanced Security - Encryption, RBAC, IAM integration, TLS automation
• Modern Observability - Prometheus/Grafana integration with automated alerting

Key Improvements

• ✅ Better Performance - 50% improvement with modern instance types and storage
• ✅ Enhanced Security - Zero-trust architecture with comprehensive encryption
• ✅ Automated Operations - Kubernetes operators handle scaling, upgrades, and repairs
• ✅ AI-Ready - Vector search and machine learning workload support

Modern Cassandra Architecture Overview

Apache Cassandra 5.0 represents a significant evolution in distributed database technology, now supporting ACID transactions, advanced query optimization, and AI workloads. Modern deployments emphasize cloud-native patterns, containerization, and automated operations.

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AWS CloudWatch Monitoring and Alerting - 2025 Edition

🚀 What’s New in This 2025 Update

Major Changes Since 2017

• Managed Observability - AWS managed Prometheus and Grafana services
• Container-Native Monitoring - Deep EKS/ECS integration with CloudWatch Container Insights
• Infrastructure as Code - CloudFormation/Terraform for monitoring automation
• AI/ML-Powered Alerts - Amazon Lookout for Metrics and SageMaker integration
• Enhanced Security - New IAM Access Analyzer and mandatory MFA for root users
• Cost Optimization - Advanced cost monitoring and resource optimization tools

Key Improvements

• ✅ Modern Observability Stack - Prometheus, Grafana, and CloudWatch integration
• ✅ Automated Monitoring - Infrastructure as Code and Lambda-based automation
• ✅ Multi-Cloud Support - Cloud-agnostic monitoring strategies
• ✅ Enhanced Security - Comprehensive security and compliance monitoring

Modern AWS Monitoring Architecture 2025

AWS monitoring has evolved significantly from custom solutions to managed observability platforms. This guide covers modern approaches using CloudWatch, Prometheus, Grafana, and Infrastructure as Code.

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Configuring metricsd to setup a disk alarm

What is MetricsD?

Metricsd is a golang program that gathers metrics from instance an AWS EC2 node and reports these metrics to places such as AWS / CloudWatch. Metrics collected include disk space, cpu activity, memory allocation, Cassandra KPIs. MetricsD is most often run as a systemd process.

Disk Gatherer reports to AWS / CloudWatch, sets alarms or sends emails.

The Disk Gatherer reports disk state information to AWS / CloudWatch, sets alarms in AWS / CloudWatch or sends emails. It leverages the df command.

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Notes on Cassandra OS setup and optimizations for deploying in EC2/AWS

Notes on Cassandra OS setup and optimizations for deploying in EC2/AWS

Disk concerns

These are important concepts for developers and DevOps who are responsible for developing Cassandra based applications and services.

Cassandra writes to four areas

• commit logs
• SSTable
• an index file
• a bloom filter

The compaction process of SSTable data makes heavy use of the disk. LeveledCompactionStrategy may need 10 to 20% overhead. SizeTieredCompactionStrategy worse case is 50% overhead needed to perform compaction. Keep this in mind while sizing disks. If you are doing a high-update use case, LeveledCompactionStrategy is the best solution if you want to limit the total disk size used at any point in time and to optimize reads as the row will be spread across less (up to ten times less) SSTables. LeveledCompactionStrategy requires more IO and processing time for compactions. If in doubt, use LeveledCompactionStrategy.

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Backup/Recovery with EBS

Understanding what AWS provides for backing up EBS volumes is an important concept for DevOps.

Data safety with EBS - Backup/Recovery (Snapshots)

Amazon EBS allows you to easily backup data. You do this by taking snapshots. Snapshots are point-in-time backups. Data written to an EBS volume can be periodically used to create a snapshot. Snapshots provide incremental backups of your data. Snapshots just saves the blocks that have changed. Only changed blocks since the last snapshot are saved in the new snapshot.

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Most bang for your buck with AWS Elastic Block Store (EBS)

Getting the most bang for your buck with AWS Elastic Block Store (EBS)

Understanding what AWS/EC2 provides for provisioning on-demand storage is critical for DevOps. Companies waste tons by over provisioning AWS.

Amazon Elastic Block Store

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) for EC2 instance storage. EBS is the virtual hard drives and SSDs for your servers running in the cloud. Amazon EBS volumes are automatically replicated, and it is easy to take snapshots of volumes to back them up in a known state. The replication happens within an availability zone (AZ).

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