AWS EC2 DR - cross region replication for COB via Lambda Function

It happens. The continuity of the business (COB) will be compromised if there is not a sound Disaster Recovery (DR) plan. DR is the ultimate goal of a business continuity plan (BCP). To accomplish this task for Amazon hosted machines we could use a CloudFormation stack template as we did for the in region backup. However, if we just need to replicate all snapshots created in a region (in region backup) to another, then all we need to build is a Lambda function and schedule it.

Create an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Role: AWS Console | Services | IAM | Roles | Create New Role | Name: CrossRegionReplication | Next | Select Role Type: AWS Lambda | Attach Policy: AmazonEC2FullAccess | Create Role

Create a Lambda Function: AWS Console | Services | Lambda | Create a Lambda Function | Configure Function | Name: replicateAll; Description: Cross Region Replication; Runtime: Python; Paste the code from aws-cross-region-replicate-all-lambda.py script and customize it to your needs; Role: CrossRegionReplication; Timeout: 5 min; | Next | Create Function Test the Lambda: You can test the whole function or just part of it using the “Test” button. Very useful for example to see what it will do if you comment the copy_snapshot() statement.

Schedule the Lambda: Select Lambda | Trigger | Add Trigger | CloudWatch Events - Schedule | Rule Name: ReplicationSchedulerRule; Rule Description: Replication Scheduler Rule; Schedule Expression: rate(1 hour) | Enable Trigger | Submit

What did we do? In the last two posts I have shown how to create a bare minimum BCP/DR for AWS EC2. There is a lot more to have ready in order to make sure that a DR datacenter can operate as the new live datacenter, however having the data volumes available is the absolute first step. Out of the snapshots we could at least manually rebuild the environment. Culture first.