Last month, we announced Rubrik Andes 5.3, which introduced a number of cloud enhancements designed to extend protection while allowing users to control cloud costs at enterprise scale. Among these new capabilities is backup and recovery for Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), which is now generally available! It seems like a good time to walk through Rubrik’s Amazon cloud-native protection capabilities. So, let’s dive into Rubrik for AWS.
For context, Polaris, our SaaS platform, integrates with the native snapshot capabilities and APIs provided by AWS for protecting Amazon EC2 instances and EBS volumes. This tight integration provides Rubrik customers with a central point of management to address various data protection use cases, including the ones below.
Flexible, Policy-Based Protection
For those unfamiliar, an SLA Domain is a Rubrik construct that encapsulates lifecycle policy options applied to one or more objects. These options include when to take a snapshot, how often to take a snapshot, and when to expire and delete a snapshot. Customers can apply an SLA Domain broadly, for example at the account level, granularly on the individual instances or volume, or by using tag rules.
Tag rules enable customers to leverage existing provisioning and governance logic to apply the appropriate SLAs across AWS accounts and regions without the need for manual intervention. Polaris performs periodic scans and applies the tag rule to any existing or new Amazon EC2 instances and EBS volumes that have been assigned that tag.
Automation is key to a well-run cloud environment. By leveraging policy-based management, Polaris gives users the flexibility to determine precisely which resources to protect and when they should be protected while avoiding error-prone manual work that is nothing more than undifferentiated heavy lifting.
Protect RDS Instances
Our most recent AWS offering is Polaris Amazon RDS Protection, which enables our customers to automate protection of Amazon RDS instances across all availability zones using the same SLA Domains already in use for EC2 and EBS. Customers can execute point-in-time recoveries with transaction logs in minutes.
Protection of Amazon RDS shares much of the same characteristics as EC2 and EBS. Rubrik Polaris orchestrates the creation and lifecycle management of database instance snapshots, mapping them to the declarative data protection policies set forth within the SLA Domain. Since Rubrik Polaris leverages native AWS APIs to generate the database snapshots, no production data leaves the customers AWS account. Database backups are securely stored inside a private S3 bucket within the customers environment, and only metadata around the time and type of backup is securely sent back to Polaris.
The simplicity, efficiency, and flexibility of Rubrik is a driving force behind why customers choose us for their data protection needs. These key characteristics are not missed within RDS protection. Customers can easily select nearly any point in time and initiate a restoration of their RDS instances. During this restoration customers additionally chose to migrate to different sized database instances or storage profiles as well as enable native AWS features such as Multi-AZ. In addition, restored databases have the ability to retain any tags that have been assigned to the source database, increasing an organization's overall operational efficiency, eliminating the mundane task or retagging infrastructure.
Summary
Managing protection of your EC2 and RDS instances doesn’t have to be a complicated process or another management burden. Using a modern data management platform like Rubrik Polaris allows customers to spend their time building business logic and applications instead of managing infrastructure.
To learn more about designing data protection for cloud-native applications in AWS, check out this blog post.