This article will walk you through how to take the RedShift snapshot, ship it to the disaster recovery region and recover the cluster using the transferred snapshot. AWS Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud offered by Amazon. Amazon Redshift can be classified as a tool in the “Big Data as a Service” category. Redshift is a traditional relational database management system with added functionality to manage very large datasets supporting high-performance analysis and reporting of those data. The maximum size for a single Amazon Redshift SQL statement is 16 MB. Redshift is more efficient at loading large volumes of data less frequently unlike MySQL which handles small volumes of data more frequently. Amazon Redshift supports client connections with many types of applications, including business intelligence (BI), reporting, data, and analytics tools.
“Red” in Redshift’s name refers to Oracle by referring to the corporate color. Amazon smartly asks customers to shift away from Oracle with RedShift.
For disaster recovery, you must take the snapshot and ship it to the other region. In this article, we will walk through how to enable cross-region snapshots and recover the cluster using it.
1. Login to AWS console.
2. Navigate to the Redshift cluster. Here we have the existing cluster called “uacls1”.
3. From the “Actions” menu, navigate to configure cross-region snapshot.
4. Select the destination region. Configure the snapshot retention period for manual snapshots and automated red-shift snapshots.
5. Navigate to the snapshots section and click on Create snapshot.
6. Switch to the DR region and look for the snapshot. We could see that the snapshot is getting copied from “us-east-2” to “us-east-1”.
7. Click on “Restore to provisioned cluster”
8. Change the cluster name if you would like to change it. In real disaster recovery situations, cluster identifier names remain the same. Click on Restore to build the cluster.
9. Here we can see that the cluster has been successfully recreated using the snapshot on the DR region.
This manual task can be completely automated using any of the IaC (Infrastructure as Code) tools. You can also schedule the Redshift snapshot in a custom schedule.
Scheduling Amazon Redshift snapshots
In Redshift, Automated snapshots are created every eight hours by default, but often this frequency of snapshots may be either too aggressive or too passive depending on the Recovery-Time-Objective(RTO) and Recovery-Point-Objective(RPO) of the solutions. Redshift provides an option for scheduling automated backups based on a customized duration as well as customized rules. To schedule automated backups, click on the schedule tab and an interface would appear to create snapshot schedules as shown below.
Conclusion:
AWS Redshift is an excellent data warehousing solution. AWS made the DR solution so simple by providing the cross-region snapshot options and custom snapshot scheduling options along with an automated snapshot feature.
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