One of the most important requirements in any projects is regular backups. On one of our projects we were using Netflix’s backup monkey and graffiti monkey combined to take snapshots of all the volumes in the account. But this deviated slightly from our requirement, we only required the backups of Production instances which were not Autoscaled (Autoscaled instances are anyway independent of the instance\/disk, so no backups needed).<\/p>\n
We (me (@hiteshBhatia<\/a>) and my colleague Aakash Garg @aakash21<\/a>) wrote couple Python scripts\u00a0(publicly\u00a0available on Github)<\/a>\u00a0which are more suited to our needs and might help others too. These scripts are part of a\u00a0\u00a0public repo (on Github) which compromises of\u00a0scripts which are helpful for managing an\u00a0AWS account.<\/p>\n This custom backup-manager of ours includes two scripts, one for the creation of images and other for deletion of old images. Both of the\u00a0script are based on tags which are applied to the instances.<\/p>\n Following scripts only manage backups of instances that have been marked with tag {“AutomaticBackup”:”True”}.<\/p>\n 1. createImagesBasedOnTags.py<\/strong><\/a> – This script creates the backup of those instances which are marked with the\u00a0tag “AutomaticBackup” with value “True” {“AutomaticBackup”:”True”}. The script also tags the resultant backups (ami) with the instance_id tag, which also helps in searching of ami associated with the instance.<\/p>\n The script also uses one more tag named “Frequency”. \u00a0It defines the frequency of backups you require in a day, default value is 1. If you are running this script twice a day use “Frequency” tag with value 2. The script would not take backups more than the Frequency in a day. I.e If Frequency is 2 and you run this script 4 times a day. It will only create backup twice because the value of Frequency tag is 2.<\/p>\n