Rubrik Polaris, our innovative SaaS platform, delivers a new breed of data management applications designed to tackle data fragmentation and simplify protection across data centers and clouds.  Many customers who have adopted Rubrik Polaris leverage the platform for their AWS workloads and are continuing to look for ways to increase automation and ditch manual tasks and ad-hoc scripts. 

In response to these needs, Rubrik Polaris now has the ability to protect Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances and Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes automatically upon creation through the use of snapshots. Once these snapshots have been taken, they can be configured to replicate automatically to another AWS Region.

Auto-Protecting Using AWS Tags

When speaking with our customers, we found that many want the ability to automatically apply appropriate protection policies to resources whenever an Amazon EC2 instance or Amazon EBS volume is created. By leveraging AWS tags, Rubrik Polaris gives users the flexibility to determine precisely which resources to protect and when they should be protected.

Rubrik Polaris makes setting up auto-protection using tags incredibly simple to implement. Users simply need to create a tag rule in the Rubrik Polaris dashboard that specifies the:

  1. tag to monitor.
  2. AWS account to manage.
  3. SLA Domain that should be attached to the specified tag.

For those unfamiliar, an SLA Domain is a Rubrik construct that encapsulates lifecycle policy options applied to one or more objects. These options include when to take a snapshot, how often to take a snapshot, and when to expire and delete a snapshot.

Assuming users have added tags during or after resource creation, Rubrik Polaris will perform periodic scans and apply the tag rule to any existing or new instances and volumes that have been assigned that tag.

Setting Up Auto-Protect Using Tags

Rubrik Polaris makes implementing auto-protect a super easy three-step process:

  1. In the Rubrik Polaris dashboard, create a tag rule that can be applied to either Amazon EC2 or Amazon EBS.

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  1. The tag rule is then associated with the SLA Domain.

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  1. Instances and volumes created with matching tags will be automatically assigned to the SLA Domain specified in the tag rule.
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Automated Replication of Snapshots

Amazon EBS snapshots, by default, are stored in Amazon S3 buckets, which are replicated across Availability Zones in a Region. However, many customers have a preference or requirement to have multiple copies of a snapshots stored in different geographic Regions. 

Automatic cross-Region replication copies an EC2 instance’s AMI and associated EBS snapshots from one Region to another. For EBS-only snapshots, only the snapshots are replicated.

As is the case with auto-protect using tags, a tag rule has to be created that maps to an SLA Domain that enables automatic cross-Region replication. When Rubrik Polaris kicks off a replication task, one of the following occurs:

  • For Amazon EC2, Rubrik Polaris issues a copy-image API call that copies over the AMI and the Amazon EBS snapshot associated with the source AMI to the target Region.
  • For Amazon EBS volume only, Rubrik Polaris issues a copy-snapshot API call that initiates copying over of the EBS snapshot to the target Region.

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Setting Up Automated Replication of Snapshots

Here’s how to easily set up automated replication:

  1. Use the Rubrik Polaris dashboard to create the appropriate SLA Domain.

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  1. As part of configuring the SLA Domain, create a replication policy that includes:
  • how long to retain the replicated AMIs and snapshots.
  • the target AWS Region.

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  1. As with auto-protect using tags, create a tag rule that could be applied to either Amazon EC2 or Amazon EBS.

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  1. The tag rule is then associated with the appropriate SLA Domain, which has a replication policy configured.

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  1. Instances and volumes created with matching tags will be automatically assigned to the SLA Domain specified in the tag rule.

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Automation is key to a well-run cloud environment. By continually adding these capabilities to Rubrik Polaris, Rubrik customers can simplify protection of their environment while avoiding error-prone manual work that is nothing more than “undifferentiated heavy lifting.”

To learn more about how Rubrik Polaris can protect your AWS estate, check out our Cloud Solutions.