AWS Lightsail snapshots – now automatic for Linux

As an update to my previous post on using lambda to automate snaphots, I’ve finally logged back into the Lightsail console and seen they have added a new feature – automatic snapshots.

There’s now an automatic snapshot section – note that the manual snapshots above are the 14 days dutifully maintained by the lambda script

It looks like the feature was added in October, based on the help site.

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Automating AWS Lightsail backups using snapshots and Lambda

Update 11/11/19 – limited automatic snapshots now available.

Some of the most glaring omissions from Lightsail are scheduled tasks or triggers – which would provide the ability to automate backups. Competitors in this space like DigitalOcean are all set, as they offer a backup option, whereas for AWS I’m assuming they hope you’ll shift over to EC2 as fast as possible to get the extra bells and whistles.

Of course you can manually create snapshots – just log in and hit the button. It’s just the scheduling that’s missing.

I have one Lightsail server that’s been running for 6 months now, and it’s all been rosy. Except – I had been using a combination of first AWS-CLI automated backups (which wasn’t ideal as it needed a machine to run them), and then some GUI automation via Skeddly. However – while Skeddly works just fine, I’d rather DIY this problem using Lambda and keep everything in cloud native functions.

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Deleting AWS Glacier Vaults via AWS CLI using a Lightsail Instance

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers some very affordable archive storage via it’s S3 Glacier service. I’ve used this on a backup account in the past to store archives, and have decided it’s time to clear down this account (oh, and save $0.32 a month in doing so).

The main challenge with doing this, is that unlike S3, S3 Glacier (objects stored directly there rather than using the Glacier storage tier within S3) objects can only be deleted via the AWS CLI. And to delete a Glacier Vault, you’ve got to delete all of the objects.

This account has some wild spending. $4.90 a month!

In this post I’ll spin up a Lightsail box and wipe out the pesky Glacier objects through the AWS CLI. This doesn’t require any changes on your local PC, but will require some patience.

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