Backup of an Oracle DB on RDS and EC2

When you use RDS, the Oracle database is automatically backed up to S3 for you. You can also take a DB snapshot at anytime or schedule snap shots.  The cost of the backup is included in the price of the database.  You will be charged for the storage in S3 for snapshots.

Amazon RDS enables automated backups of your DB Instance with a 1 day retention period. Free backup storage is limited to the size of your provisioned database and only applies to active DB Instances. For example, if you have 10GB-months of provisioned database storage, AWS will provide at most 10GB-months of backup storage at no additional charge.

You can not use tools like Oracle RMAN or the Oracle Secure Backup for S3 to backup Oracle RDS.

RDS cross region snapshots

Great news for AWS RDS users looking to provide extra DR protection to their SQL Server, Oracle and MySQL databases: http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2013/10/31/announcing-point-and-click-copy-of-amazon-rds-db-snapshots-across-aws-regions/

AWS disaster recovery for applications, database and storage

When coming up with an approach to perform disaster recovery on AWS from your on premise environment,  you need to look at these layers of your system as individual entities.  This is because for each of them their are different tools and approaches.

1. Storage Layer: The storage layer includes multi media files, batch files, log files and any other files that not directly owned by the application or database server.  These files are typically on SAN or NAS devices on premise.

More information here:

http://cloudconclave.blogspot.com/2013/04/on-premise-application-replication-and.html

2. Database Layer:  This would be data files associated with your relational or NoSQL database.  There are many database vendor specific tools. So the best approach is typically to use the tool or facility provided by the DB vendor.  More information in these blog entries:
http://cloudconclave.blogspot.com/2013/01/disaster-recovery-in-cloud-options.html
http://cloudconclave.blogspot.com/2013/03/aws-ebs-snapshot-volumes-for-mysql.html – More on snapshots as apply to MySQL

http://cloudconclave.blogspot.com/2013/03/aws-ec2-oracle-database-backup.html - OSB or EBS snapshots
http://cloudconclave.blogspot.com/2012/10/oracle-helps-amazon-save-money-on.html – More on OSB
http://cloudconclave.blogspot.com/2013/01/oracle-exadata-dr-to-cloud.html - Exadata
http://cloudconclave.blogspot.com/2013/02/oracle-secure-backup-restore.html – Recovery speed for OSB

3. Application Layer:  The application layer includes all source code (Java, PHP, Ruby, HTML etc), log files and anything else associated with your application server.

More entries in these blog entries:

http://cloudconclave.blogspot.com/2012/11/aws-storage-gateway-for-application-dr.html

http://cloudconclave.blogspot.com/2013/04/on-premise-application-replication-and.html

AWS RDS cross region replication

RDS offers a simple way to replicate across AZs (Multi-AZ feature) for fault tolerance and high availability.  RDS cross region synchronization / replication provides additional fault tolerance.  This is an interesting situation because RDS is a 'black box'/PaaS/DaaS environment. Therefore, no access to the OS level is provided. This means this replication solutions like MySQL Replication or Oracle Goldengate can not be used.  Until RDS offers snapshots like the new EBS region snapshotting, you will have to use tools like BitTorrent or CloudBeam to move database dump files across regions.You could use DB links with materialized views as this article mentions: http://aws.amazon.com/articles/4173109646282306. DB Links are slow but if you don't have a low RTO and RPO you could use this...Or come up with your own creative solution.

Oracle on AWS - EBS mirroring

Question RAID and EBS Raid 1 - Does AWS EBS provide recovery from an EBS volume since the data is automatically mirrored by AWS?

Response:  It depends on whether  you want control over the recovery for mirroring.   Using the built in mirroring means you do not control the mirroring and therefore when recovery happens.  Other options include using Oracle Standby DB/DataGuard, GoldenGate or even EBS snapshots.