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Oh snap: AWS has only gone and brought out its own Backup

Has it gotten backuppers' backs up? You bet it has

Amazon has rolled out its own backup service for AWS apps and data, a move that will inevitably hit independent suppliers of backup for the cloud computing service right in the wallet.

AWS Backup protects storage volumes, databases, and file systems across Amazon's DynamoDB, Elastic Block Store (EBS), Elastic File System (Amazon EFS), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), and AWS Storage Gateway, with support for additional services planned for the future.

Customers will also be able to back up on-premises application data through the AWS Backup integration with the firm's own Storage Gateway.

Bill Vass, AWS VP for Storage, Automation, and Management Service spoke of the type of customers the firm plans to poach from backup businesses:

Some are tinkerers who want to tweak and fine tune the full range of AWS services into a desired architecture, and other builders are drawn to the same breadth and depth of functionality in AWS, but are willing to trade some of the service granularity to start at a higher abstraction layer, so they can build even faster. We designed AWS Backup for this second type of builder who has told us that they want one place to go for backups versus having to do it across multiple, individual services.

AWS backups are based on snapshots and available in the US East, US West and Europe geographies. They are set up and managed through an AWS Management Console through which users can configure and audit the AWS resources they backup, automate backup scheduling, set retention policies, and monitor recent backups and restores in one place.

Pricing

The cost is based on the size of backup space used per-month amount of backup data. A first backup will be full with subsequent incremental backups needing less space and therefore costing less. There are also separate restore charges.

Both backup and restore prices varies between warm and cold (archive) storage, with cold storage being set up for EFS file system backups only for now.

Sample prices for the US East region are below:

  AWS Service Warm $/month Cold $/month
Backup EFS 0.05 0.01/GB
  EBS 0.05 n/a
  RDS Database 0.095 n/a
  DynamoDB Table 0.10 n/a
  Storage Gateway 0.05 n/a
Restore EFS 0.02/GB 0.03/GB
  EBS Free n/a
  RDS Database Free n/a
  DynamoDB Table 0.05/GB n/a
  Storage Gateway Free n/a

An AWS cost example based on 400GB of Amazon EFS backup storage during 15 days in a month and 800GB for the other 15 days in the month, plus restoring 10 backups that were 1GB each, would attract a total monthly AWS backup bill of $30.20.

OH GOOD GOD NO... er, we're still better - backup vendors

Many independent backup suppliers have developed in-cloud backup services for AWS. One of the first was Spanning and it was followed by others such as Acronis, Commvault, Druva and Veeam.

A stung source close to a major independent AWS backup supplier said Amazon's move was disappointing, considering the pair were supposed to be biz partners.

They claimed they are not wholly worried about Amazon's move, but Amazon's marketing muscle is strong and the whole proposition is nothing if not convenient: if users can select AWS backup services when setting up other Amazon services, the service will have strong appeal.

One of the indie vendor insiders we spoke to was quick to assure The Reg that, for example, with AWS Backup you can't push a workload from AWS to Azure, which you can with this, and other independent vendors' service.

Our backup supplier sources acknowledged AWS convenience would be a strong factor but warned that customers should beware of lock-in, particularly in the emerging multi-cloud world.

Customers and channel types should also brace themselves for a slew of feature and cost comparisons against AWS Backup and produce comparison tables.

But, whatever the independents do, AWS Backup's convenience will have a strong appeal to its customers. We expect Amazon to capture a substantial portion of the total addressable market for backup in the Amazon cloud. ®

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