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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AWS VPC Guide 2025: From Basic Networking to VPC Lattice

What’s New in 2025

Key Updates and Changes

• VPC Lattice GA: Application-layer networking for microservices across VPCs
• IPAM Tiers: Free tier for single region, Advanced tier ($0.00027/IP/hour) for multi-region
• IPv6 Adoption: Dual-stack configurations now standard practice
• Enhanced Security: VPC Lattice enables zero-trust networking patterns
• Service Network Endpoints: Connect services across accounts without complex routing

Major Service Evolution

• VPC Peering: Still relevant for simple, pairwise connections
• Transit Gateway: Remains the choice for hub-and-spoke architectures
• VPC Lattice: New paradigm for application-layer connectivity
• IPAM Integration: Automated IP management across organizations
• Resource Gateways: New construct for secure resource sharing

Understanding what AWS provides for setting up private networks, security groups and more is important for anyone who calls themselves DevOps. In 2025, the networking landscape has evolved significantly with VPC Lattice and enhanced IPAM capabilities.

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Cassandra 5.0 Cluster Setup 2025: Docker, Vagrant, and Cloud-Native DevOps

What’s New in 2025

Key Updates and Changes

• Cassandra 5.0: Vector search, SAI indexes, unified compaction strategy
• Container-First: Docker and Kubernetes have replaced most Vagrant workflows
• Cloud-Native: Multi-cloud deployment with infrastructure as code
• ARM Support: Native ARM64 support for Apple Silicon and AWS Graviton
• Observability: Enhanced monitoring with OpenTelemetry and Prometheus

Major Platform Evolution

• Docker Compose: Simplified multi-container orchestration
• Kubernetes: Production-ready Cassandra operators
• Testcontainers: Integration testing with ephemeral containers
• Colima/Podman: Docker alternatives for development
• GitOps: Infrastructure managed through Git workflows

The modern approach to Cassandra cluster development has evolved significantly since 2017. While Vagrant remains useful for certain scenarios, container-based development has become the standard for 2025.

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Cassandra Tutorial 3, Part 1: Deploy Cassandra with Ansible and SSH Keys - Modern DevOps Practices 2025

Cassandra Tutorial 3, Part 1: Modern Cassandra Deployment with Ansible - 2025 Edition

What’s New in 2025

This updated tutorial reflects the significant changes in DevOps practices since our original 2017 guide:

• Container-First Approach: Cassandra deployments now primarily use containers (Docker/Podman)
• Kubernetes Native: StatefulSets and operators for managing Cassandra clusters
• GitOps Workflows: Using ArgoCD or Flux for declarative cluster management
• Modern Ansible: Ansible 2.16+ with collections and execution environments
• Enhanced Security: Zero-trust networking, service mesh integration, and secrets management
• Cloud Provider Integration: Native support for AWS, GCP, and Azure Kubernetes services
• Observability: Built-in Prometheus metrics and distributed tracing

Overview

In this modernized tutorial, we’ll deploy a production-ready Cassandra cluster using:

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Cloud DevOps 2025: Packer, Ansible, SSH and AWS/EC2

What’s New in 2025

Key Updates and Changes

• New EC2 Instance Types: M7i, C7i, and R7i families now available with up to 15% better price-performance
• Packer Updates: Version 1.11 with predictable plugin loading and HCP integration
• Ansible Best Practices: Enhanced aws_ec2 plugin with improved security and performance features
• EBS Volume Evolution: GP3 volumes now standard, offering 20% cost savings over GP2
• HashiCorp Updates: Terraform AWS Provider 6.0 with multi-region support
• Security Enhancements: AWS Verified Access for SSH/RDP, enhanced IAM with ECR Policy v2

Deprecated Features and Migration Notes

• GP2 to GP3 Migration: GP2 volumes should be migrated to GP3 for cost savings
• EC2 Dynamic Inventory: Old ec2.py script deprecated in favor of aws_ec2 plugin
• Instance Types: Consider upgrading from M6i to M7i instances for better performance
• Packer AWS Builder: Continue using amazon-ebs builder with updated authentication methods

Cloud DevOps: Using Packer, Ansible/SSH and AWS command line tools to create and DBA manage EC2 Cassandra instances in AWS.

This article is useful for developers and DevOps/DBA staff who want to create AWS AMI images and manage those EC2 instances with Ansible. Although this article is part of a series about setting up the Cassandra Database images and doing DevOps/DBA with Cassandra clusters, the topics we cover apply to AWS DevOps in general - even if you don’t use Cassandra at all.

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Cloud DevOps: Packer, Ansible, SSH and AWS/EC2

Cloud DevOps: Using Packer, Ansible/SSH and AWS command line tools to create and DBA manage EC2 Cassandra instances in AWS.

This article is useful for developers and DevOps/DBA staff who want to create AWS AMI images and manage those EC2 instances with Ansible. Although this article is part of a series about setting up the Cassandra Database images and doing DevOps/DBA with Cassandra clusters, the topics we cover apply to AWS DevOps in general - even if you don’t use Cassandra at all.

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Setting up a Cassandra cluster with SSL for client and cluster transports for DevOps

Setting up client and cluster SSL transport for a Cassandra cluster

This articles is a Cassandra tutorial on Cassandra setup for SSL and CQL clients, as well as installing Cassandra with SSL configured on a series of Linux servers.

Cassandra allows you to secure the client transport (CQL) as well as the cluster transport (storage transport).

SSL/TLS have some overhead. This is especially true in the JVM world which is not as performant for handling SSL/TLS unless you are using Netty/OpenSSl integration.

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Setting up a Cassandra cluster with cassandra image and cassandra cloud project with Vagrant for DevOps

The cassandra-image project creates CentOS Cassandra Database images for docker, virtualbox/vagrant and AWS/EC2 using best practices for Cassandra OS setup. It is nice to use vagrant and/or docker for local development. At this time it is hard to develop systemd services using Docker so we use Vagrant. Since we do a lot of that, we like to use Vagrant.

Vagrant is important for developers and DevOps not to mention Cassandra DBAs.

The cassandra-image project packages systemd utilities

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Systemd dependencies example

We use systemd unit quite a bit. Getting dependencies correct can be tricky. We use systemd to start up Cloudurable Cassandra config scripts. We use systemd to start up Cassandra/Kafka, and to shut Cassandra/Kafka down nicely.

Since systemd is pervasive in all new mainstream Linux distributions, you can see that systemd is an important concept for DevOps.

We wrote this little example to try to understand how systemd dependencies work, and explain it to others.

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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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AWS VPC

Understanding what AWS provides for setting up private networks, security groups and more is important for anyone who calls themselves DevOps.

AWS allows you to define a software defined network. You do this with Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). You can define subnets, ingress rules, security groups, NAT gateways, Internet gateways, and more.

Amazon VPC

A VPC is a virtual private cloud. You can create multiple Amazon VPCs within a region that spans multiple availability zones. A VPC is an isolated area to deploy instances.

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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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