Summary

ebs-snapman is a utility to assist with the creation and management of AWS EC2 EBS snapshots. This is meant to be used manually,cron, or integrated into other backup processes.

Dependencies

These can be verified prior to installation. See the "Installation" section below

####Operating System

I assume this could be made to work under cygwin

linux or Mac OSX (bash,egrep,grep,sed,awk,expr,perl,python,sort)

####Extra packages

jq (http://stedolan.github.io/jq/ or check your package manager)
awscli (pip install awscli)

AWS Permissions

The following permissions are required:

####EC2

create-snapshot
create-tags
delete-snapshot
describe-snapshots
describe-instances
describe-volumes

####IAM

get-user

Installation

By default this will be installed to /opt. If you would like it to go somewhere else just edit PREFIX in the Makefile.

help:

  *default PREFIX is /opt

  make testdeps           checks that all deps are met
  make install            installs ebs-snapman to PREFIX
  make uninstall          removes ebs-snapman from PREFIX

Features and Usage

No need to pass credentials for authentication. Since this tool uses the AWS CLI you only need to specify the region and profile name as defined in ~/.aws/credentials.

Usage: ebs-snapman.sh [options] <command> [parameters]

  --help                          this message
  --region <region>               aws region  (see aws help for more info)
  --profile <profile>             aws profile (see aws help for more info)


Available commands are:

  create
  list
  remove

Creating snapshots

You can create snapshots by specifying a list of volumes, instances, or name-tags. You can also choose to snap all volumes for your AWS account or all USED volumes to avoid snapping volumes that were never cleaned up.

--volume-ids <vol1,vol2>        volumes(s) (comma separated) to snap
--all-used-volumes <owner id>   this will snap all volumes in use by ec2 instances
--all-volumes <owner id>        this will snap both used/unused volumes
--instance-ids <i1,i2>          instance(s) (comma separated) to snap
--nametags <host1,host2>        snap instances w/ this name tag (comma separated)

During the snapshot creation process, each snapshot is generated with several additional tags to assist you with any recovery that may be needed.

ebs_snapman=1       # to denote that this was created by this program
src_instance        # shows which instance this snapshot belongs to
device              # associates this snapshot with a device (eg: /dev/sdg)
src_instance_type   # the instance type .. in case you really need to know
snap_user           # the IAM user that created the snapshot
src_instance_name   # the instance name-tag

Listing snapshots

You can list snapshots by specifying a list of volumes, instances, or name-tags. You can also choose to list all snapshots for your AWS account. Listing snapshots will provide a simple comma separated output with the following information:

VolumeId, SnapshotId, StartTime(timestamp), Progress(percent)

Below is the options as presented at the terminal:

--all <owner id>            this will list all snapshots
--volume-ids <vol1,vol2>    list snapshots for these volumes(s) (comma separated)
--instance-ids <i1,i2>      list snapshots for defined instance(s) (comma separated)
--nametags <host1,host2>    list snapshots for instances w/ this name tag (comma separated)

The idea is to provide you and I with enough information to create our own snapshot rotation by parsing this information and leverage the remove functionality of this program.

Removing snapshots

You can remove snapshots by specifying a list of snapshots, instances, or name-tags. You can all choose to remove all snapshots for your AWS account.

--all <owner id>            remove all snapshots
--snapshot-ids <s1,s2>      snapshot(s) (comma separated) to remove
--instance-ids <i1,i2>      remove all snapshots for listed instance(s) (comma separated)
--nametags <host1,host2>    remove all snapshots for instances w/ this name tag (comma separated)