EC2 Snapshotter
This program allows for a simple mechanism to snapshot all volumes in your EC2 environment.
This can run on any server, but will backup any volumes that have a tag with a key of Backup
and a value of True.
The program will also automatically clean up all snapshots it has created that are older than
one month. It does this by only deleting volumes with the tag key of Snapshotter and a value
of True which have a snapshot start time of over one month ago.
Included in this package is an AWS Lambda handler that can be setup to automatically perform the backups via a Scheduled Event source.
System Requirements
You must have Java 8 to run the executable JAR.
Building the program
Currently we only support building through Maven. To package this into a runnable JAR that
also contains all of the dependencies, simply run the following command from the directory
containing the pom.xml file.
mvn clean package
The resulting JAR file will be available in the target directory.
Running the program
java -jar ec2-snapshotter.jar [AWS-Key AWS-Secret]
The AWS key and secret are optional and when omitted, the program will attempt to auto-detect the credentials via DefaultAWSCredentialsProviderChain (Environment, system properties, default profile, and finally EC2 instance profile). Make sure you have the appropriate permissions on your IAM role to allow listing volumes, creating and deleting snapshots, and tagging resources.
Scheduling the Backup using AWS Lambda
You will need to setup an IAM role that has the appropriate AWS Lambda trust relationship and the appropriate permissions to log events to CloudWatch, read volumes, create tags, read tags, create and delete snapshots. The simplest way to do this is to create a new AWS Lambda service role and give it the AmazonEC2FullAccess and CloudWatchLogsFullAccess managed policies. You may create a more limiting role if you desire that.
With the role in place, create a new Java 8 runtime lambda function and upload the built version of this project. After uploading, you can run a Test to verify it creates all expected snapshots instantly. Depending on how many volumes you plan to backup, you might need to adjust the Timeout configuration. I'd suggest at least a minute. All other defaults should be sufficient. The Handler value is:
com.marcbaumbach.ec2.snapshotter.LambdaHandler::handleRequest
Finally, under the Event sources, create a new event source and select Scheduled Event. You may select any schedule you desire the backup to run on.
Scheduling the Backup using Cron
On Linux, you can use cron to perform scheduled backups. The following crontab entry will
run every night at midnight server local time.
0 0 * * * java -jar /path/to/program/ec2-snapshotter.jar
By default, all logging is sent to standard out, which will be logged in the cron log.
If you want logs to be saved on the server in a different location, you may want to adjust
the included log4j.xml file to use the file appender in place of the LAMBDA one.
Additionally, you may override with your own log4j configuration as part of your script
call in the crontab.
License
The EC2 Snapshotter is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License.