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A few days ago a colleague and friend of mine was talking with me about secure ways to have your data backed up and accessible all the time. By obvious reason the term store your data in the cloud came out soon. The debate was among many things: DVD, LTO, CD, External Hard Drives, Servers, Cloud. At first sight the cloud idea seemed good and within a reasonable price. The question that came out of the discussion was the fact that Cloud providers charge your Credit Card for what you consume in terms of Cloud Resources (the same as your electric bill). So the question arise, what happen if you store your important data in the cloud (assuming you took security measures) and your CC expires? Well, this article will explain a small experiment that we did with Amazon Cloud Provider. Soon you will know if your data disappears the moment you don’t pay your Amazon your bill.
Methodology
At the moment of the experiment we did not have a Credit Card near the expiration point (that will be presented in a later post) laying around. Thus we use another technique to provide a close reality check between Amazon as a Cloud Provider and the relation of your data and their money. We proceeded in the following way:
- Created an Amazon account with a Credit Card.
- We subscribed in EC2 and S3 services from amazon.
- We turned on EC2 windows and Linux instances.
- We created EBS drives and hook them with the Linux and EC2 instances.
- We setup basic web servers and MySQL databases for each instance.
- We created backups from the MySQL into S3 and also filesystem level backups in S3.
- We waited about a month. Before the Amazon bill was ready, we call our CC provider and ask them to block all charges from Amazon.
- Waited until Amazon charge us and block our account.
Results
After Amazon tried charging our credit card and the American Express bank refuse the bill, our Amazon AWS login did not work anymore. For our surprise, our AWS keys kept working. So we were able to:
- Download and upload data into S3.
- Keep managing instances of EC2.
- Using all our instances services (Database, WebServer, and others).
The Amazon Cloud service passed the test. They were reliable and trust worthy enough not to turned off all the instances and delete all the data in S3. Obviously this is a small test and not enough to say that is the rule. I will like to hear your impressions, experiences and concerns.
Tips for Keeping your AWS Services Running:
- Always use a second credit card in the account registration as a backup.
- As a contingency plan keep your data located in a different place than your cloud provider.
- Do not trust the data storage, always use some type of encryption.
If you have suggestions on how to do any of the tips above please leave your comments they are greatly appreciated.
Really a nice article.I am a beginner in EC2 and exploring EC2 features. I am bit confused in EBS. I have created EBS volume and hooked them to EC2 instance. Now, do I need to upload backup of MySQL to S3? For that, can I find any script that takes backup of MySQL periodically and upload that to S3.
Hi Rupendra:Thanks for your complements, and sorry I could not get to you sooner. I have been a little detached from blogging. Well to answer your question. EBS is a virtual hard drive that persist across instances. You can tell your instance that holds MySQL to store the databases inside your attached EBS volume, and you can snapshot that volume in a cron job every "x" minutes. Also, for security reasons, if you want to be extra careful, you could have a script and upload one or more database to a specific bucket in S3. I hope this is helpful.Thanks very much for your comment, and sorry again for the long delay.GeoPS. The post below will help you a lot to get your objective: http://www.cenolan.com/2008/05/simple-linux-to-amazon-s3-backup-script/