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>> Okay, we're back covering AWS Storage Day 2022
with Ashish Palekar.
Who's the general manager of AWS EBS
Snapshot and Edge and Cami Tavares.
Who's the head of product at Amazon EBS.
Thanks for coming back in theCube guys.
Great to see you again.
>> Great to see you as well, Dave.
>> Great to see you, Dave.
Ashish, we've been hearing a lot today about companies
all kinds of applications to the cloud
and AWS and using their data in new ways.
Resiliency is always top of mind for companies
when they think about just generally their workloads
and specifically the clouds.
How should they think about customers
think about data resiliency?
>> Yeah, when we think about data resiliency
it's all about making sure that your application data,
the data that your application needs is available
when it needs it.
It's really the ability for your workload to mitigate
disruptions or recover from them.
And to build that resilient architecture you really need
to understand what kinds of disruptions
your applications can experience.
How broad the impact of those disruptions is,
and then how quickly you need to recover.
And a lot of this is a function of what
the application does,
how critical it is.
And the thing that we constantly tell customers is,
this works differently in the cloud
than it does in a traditional on-premises environment.
>> What's different about the cloud versus on-prem?
Can you explain how it's different?
>> Yeah, let me start with a video on-premises one.
And in the on-premises one, building resilient architectures
is really the customer's responsibility,
and it's very challenging.
You'll start thinking about what your single
points of failure are.
To avoid those, you have to build in redundancy,
you might build in replication as an example for storage
and doing this now means you have to have provision
more hardware.
And depending on what your availability requirements are,
you may even have to start looking
for multiple data centers, some in the same regions,
some in different geographical locations.
And you have to ensure that you're fully automated,
so that your recovery processes can take place.
And as you can see that's a lot of owners being placed
on the customer.
One other thing that we hear about is really elasticity
and how elasticity plays into
the resiliency for applications.
As an example, if you experience a sudden spike
in workloads, in a on-premises environment,
that can lead to resource saturation.
And so really you have two choices.
One is to sort of throttle the workload
and experience resiliency, or your second option becomes
buying additional hardware and securing more capacity
and keeping it fair low in case
of experiencing such a spike.
And so your two propositions that are either
experiencing resiliency, challenges or paying really
to have infrastructure that's lying around.
And both of those are different really
when you start thinking about the cloud.
>> Yeah, there's a third option too, which is lose data,
which is not an option.
Go ahead- >> Which is not, yeah,
I pretty much as a storage person,
that is not an option.
The reason about that that we think is reasonable
for customers to take.
The big contrast in the cloud really comes with
how we think about capacity.
And fundamentally the the cloud gives you that access
to capacity so you are not managing that capacity.
The infrastructure complexity and the cost associated
with that are also just a function of how infrastructure
is built really in the cloud.
But all of that really starts with the bedrock
of how we design for avoiding single points of failure.
The best way to explain this is really
to start thinking about our availability zones.
Typically these availability zones consist
of multiple data centers, located in the same regional area
to enable high throughput and low latency for applications.
But the availability zones themselves
are physically independent.
They have independent connections to utility power,
standalone backup power resources,
independent mechanical services
and independent network connectivity.
We take availability zone independence extremely seriously,
so that when customers are building the availability
of their workload, they can architect
using these multiple zones.
And that is something that when I'm talking to customers
or Tami is talking to customers, we highly encourage
customers to keep in mind as they're building
resiliency for their applications.
>> Right, so you can have within an availability zone,
you can have, you know, instantaneous, you know
when you're doing it right.
You've got, you've captured that data
and you can asynchronously move to outside of that
in case there's, the very low probability,
but it does happen, you get some disasters.
You're minimizing that RPO.
And I don't have to worry about that as a customer
and figuring out how to do three site data centers.
>> That's right.
Like that even further, now imagine
if you're expanding globally.
All those things that we described about like creating
new footprint and creating a new region
and finding new data centers.
As a customer in an on-premises environment,
you take that on yourself.
Whereas with AWS, because of our global presence,
you can expand to a region and bring those same
operational characteristics to those environments.
And so again, bringing resiliency as you're thinking
about expanding your workload, that's another benefit
that you get from using the availability zone
region architecture that AWS has.
>> And as Charles Phillips, former CEO of Infor said,
"Friends, don't let friends build data center,"
so I don't have to worry about building the data center.
Let's bring Cami into the discussion here.
Cami, think about elastic block storage,
it gives, you know customers, you get persistent
block storage for EC2 instances.
So it's foundational for any mission critical
or business critical application that you're
building on AWS.
How do you think about data resiliency in EBS specifically?
I always ask the question, what happens
if something goes wrong?
So how should we think about data resiliency
in EBS specifically?
>> Yeah, you're right Dave, block storage
is a really foundational piece.
When we talk to customers about building in the cloud
or moving an application to the cloud,
and data resiliency is something that comes up all the time.
And with EBS, you know EBS is a very large
distributed system with many components.
And we put a lot of thought and effort
to build resiliency into EBS.
So we design those components to operate
and fail independently.
So when customers create an EBS volume for example,
we'll automatically choose the best storage nodes
to address the failure domain
and the data protection strategy
for each of our different volume types.
And part of our resiliency strategy also includes
separating what we call a volume life cycle control plane.
Which are things like creating a volume,
or attaching a volume to an EC2 instance.
So we separate that control plane,
from the storage data plane,
which includes all the components that are responsible
for serving IO to your instance,
and then persisting it to durable media.
So what that means is once a volume is created
and attached to the instance, the operations on that volume
they're independent from the control point function.
So even in the case of an infrastructure event,
like a power issue, for example,
you can recreate an EBS volume from a snapshot.
And speaking of snapshots, that's the other core pillar
of resiliency in EBS.
Snapshots are point in time copies of EBS volumes
that would store in S3.
And snapshots are actually a regional service.
And that means internally we use multiple
of the availability zones that Ashish was talking about
to replicate your data so that the snapshots
can withstand the failure of an availability zone.
And so thanks to that availability zone independence,
and then this builtin component independence,
customers can use that snapshot and recreate
an EBS following another AZO or even in another region
if they need to.
>> Great so, okay,
so you touched on some of the things EBS does
to build resiliency into the service.
Now thinking about over your right shoulders,
you know, Joan Deviva, so what can organizations do
to build more resilience into their applications
on EBS so they can enjoy life without anxiety?
>> (laughs) That is a great question.
Also something that we love to talk to customers about.
And the core thing to think about here is that
we don't believe in a one size fits all approach.
And so what we are doing in EBS is we give customers
different tools so that they can design a resiliency
strategy that is custom tailored for their data.
And so to do this, this resiliency assessment,
you have to think about the context of this
specific workload and ask questions like
what other critical services depend on this data
and what will break if this data's not available
and how long can can those systems withstand
that, for example.
And so the most important step I'll mention it again,
snapshots, that is a very important step
in a recovery plan.
Make sure you have a backup of your data.
And so we actually recommend
that customers take the snapshots at least daily.
And we have features that make that easier for you.
For example, Data Lifecycle Manager
which is a feature that is entirely free.
It allows you to create backup policies,
and then you can automate the process
of creating the snapshot, so it's very low effort.
And then when you want to use that backup
to recreate a volume, we have a feature called
Fast Snapshot Restore, that can expedite
the creation of the volume.
So if you have a more, you know
a shorter recovery time objective
you can use that feature to expedite the recovery process.
So that's backup.
And then the other pillar we talked to customers about
is data replication.
Just another very important step when you're thinking
about your resiliency and your recovery plans.
So with EBS, you can use replication tools
that work at the level of the operating system.
So that's something like DRBD for example.
Or you can use AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery,
and that will replicate your data
across availability zones or nearby regions too.
So we talked about backup and replication,
and then the last topic that we recommend customers
think about is having a workload
monitoring solution in place.
And you can do that in EBS, using cloud watch metrics.
So you can monitor the health of your EBS volume
using those metrics.
We have a lot of tips in our documentation
on how to measure that performance.
And then you can use those performance metrics as triggers
for automated recovery workflows
that you can build using tools
like auto scaling groups for example.
>> Great, thank you for that advice.
Just quick follow up.
So you mentioned your recommendation, at least daily,
what kind of granularity, if I want to compress my RPO
can I go at a more granular level?
>> Yes, you can go more granular
and you can use again the daily lifecycle manager
to define those policies.
>> Great, thank you.
Before we go, I want to just quickly cover
what's new with EBS.
Ashish, maybe you could talk about, I understand
you've got something new today.
You've got an announcement, take us through that.
>> Yeah, thanks for checking in and I'm so glad you asked.
We talked about how snapshots help resilience
and are a critical part of building resilient architectures.
So customers like the simplicity of backing up
their EC2 instances, using multi volume snapshots.
And what they're looking for is the ability to back up only
to exclude specific volumes from the backup,
especially those that don't need backup.
So think of applications that have cash data,
or applications that have temporary data
that really doesn't need backup.
So today we are adding a new parameter
to the create snapshots API,
which creates a crash consistent set of snapshots
for volumes attached to an EC2 instance.
Where customers can now exclude specific volumes
from an instance backup.
So customers using data life cycle manager
that can be touched on, can automate their backups.
And again they also get to exclude these specific volumes.
So really the feature is not just about convenience,
but it's also to help customers save on cost.
As many of these customers are managing tens
of thousands of snapshots.
And so we want to make sure they can take it
at the granularity that they need it.
So super happy to bring that into the
hands of customers as well.
>> Yeah, that's a nice option.
Okay, Ashish, Cami thank you so much for coming back
in theCube, helping us learn about what's new
and what's cool and EBS, appreciate your time.
>> Thank you for having us Dave.
>> You're very welcome now, if you want to learn more
about EBS resilience, stay right here because coming up,
we've got a session which is a deep dive
on protecting mission critical workloads
with Amazon EBS.
Stay right there, you're watching theCube's coverage
of AWS Storage Day 2022.
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