Jul
ZFS snapshots to and from Amazon S3
The Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is a “storage for the Internet”. A web services interface can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. The S3 feature set includes:
- Write, read, and delete objects containing from 1 byte to 5 gigabytes of data each. The number of objects you can store is unlimited.
- Each object is stored in a bucket and retrieved via a unique, developer-assigned key.
- A bucket can be located in the United States or in Europe. All objects within the bucket will be stored in the bucket’s location, but the objects can be accessed from anywhere.
- Authentication mechanisms are provided to ensure that data is kept secure from unauthorized access. Objects can be made private or public, and rights can be granted to specific users.
- Uses standards-based REST and SOAP interfaces designed to work with any Internet-development toolkit.
- Built to be flexible so that protocol or functional layers can easily be added. Default download protocol is HTTP. A BitTorrent(TM) protocol interface is provided to lower costs for high-scale distribution. Additional interfaces will be added in the future.
- Reliability backed with the Amazon S3 Service Level Agreement.
There is a fee for storage (15c per GB=month in the US) and a fee for data transferred in (10c per GB) and out (starting at 17c per GB and going down with volume). There is also a small fee for PUT, POST, GET and LIST requests.
Amazon EC2
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. To use Amazon EC2:
- Create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) containing your applications, libraries, data and associated configuration settings. Or use pre-configured, templated images to get up and running immediately.
- Upload the AMI into Amazon S3. Amazon EC2 provides tools that make storing the AMI simple. Amazon S3 provides a safe, reliable and fast repository to store your images.
- Use Amazon EC2 web service to configure security and network access.
- Start, terminate, and monitor as many instances of your AMI as needed, using the web service APIs.
- Pay only for the resources that you actually consume, like instance-hours or data transfer.
OpenSolaris on ECS
Sun and Amazon are collaborating to offer OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2. The two supported releases are OpenSolaris OS 2008.05 and Solaris Express Community Edition.
Saving and Restoring ZFS Snapshots to and from Amazon S3
Sean O’Dell has posted a blog entry that shows how to use ZFS snapshots to “save and restore filesystems from one Solaris EC2 instance to another.”
