Last year, AWS re:Invent brought a ton of new products and services enhancements, with a major focus on AI, and analytics but also multiple enhancements in application integration, new capabilities in cloud financial management, additions to compute services, advancements in contact center solutions, and updates in networking, storage, security, and quantum technologies. Some of the new features below are competing with Veeam, some are already integrated with VBR 12.1 and VBA, and some might enable us to improve the services we deliver to our customers.
During re:Invent, our System Engineers and Solution Architects demonstrated Veeam new features in Veeam Backup and Replication v12.1 and Veeam Backup for AWS v7 including S3 Protection (Backup Objects), Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL backup to Amazon S3, DynamoDB protection and more…
Here are the announcements that specifically pertain to Veeam:
Announcing the new Amazon S3 Express One Zone high performance storage class
The new Amazon S3 Express One Zone storage class is designed to deliver up to 10x better performance than the S3 Standard storage class. This means that customers can use S3 objects in production environments and achieve better performance than before.
While this is not a typical backup target, customers might want to backup S3 Express.
Amazon EBS Snapshots Archive is now available with AWS Backup
This feature lets you transition your infrequently accessed Amazon EBS Snapshots to low-cost archive, long-term storage.
Amazon has introduced the Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) Snapshots Archive with AWS Backup, expanding the options for managing infrequently accessed EBS Snapshots. Previously available only through the EC2 console or Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager, this feature allows users to transition rarely accessed snapshots to low-cost, long-term archive storage, offering a cost-effective solution for data that does not require frequent retrieval.
Similar to Glacier, EBS Cold storage has a minimum retention period of 90 days.
The pricing is $0.0125/GB/Month and the restore cost is $0.03/GB.
AWS Backups transitioned to cold storage must be retained for a minimum of 90 days. Backups deleted before 90 days incur a pro-rated charge equal to the storage charge for the remaining days.
Comparing our Veeam Backup for AWS solution – We backup EBS volumes to S3 where S3 Standard is $0.023/GB/Month*, and we compress data before storing in S3.
*To compare (Storage cost only)
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| AWS BACKUP | VEEAM S3 STANDARD | VEEAM TO GLACIER INSTANT RETRIEVAL | VEEAM TO GLACIER DEEP ARCHIVE |
| 100 GB EBS BACKUP | $1.25 | $1.15 | $0.20 | $0.10 |
| 100 GB RESTORE | $3 | $0 | $3 | $2 |
S3 Object Lock Support for Existing Buckets
Previously, Object Lock was only available in the API for new buckets, and you had to call in to AWS Support to turn it on for existing data sets. No more. Now you can enable Object Lock on existing buckets and turn on S3 Replication for locked datasets. We do not support enabling Object Lock support for existing repositories (I.E making a non-object lock repository to an object lock repository)
Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval – Accelerated restores
AWS have introduced accelerated restores from Glacier Flexible retrieval which could reduce the restore time Significantly with first byte retrieval lowered to about 20 minutes from 3 hours.
Veeam Backup and Replication v12.1 and Veeam Backup for AWS v7 includes this new feature and gives our customers the ability to recover faster from data that is stored in colder storage by utilizing AWS S3 Batch Operations and providing a manifest of objects to be retrieved and specifying a retrieval tier.
Amazon S3 Batch Operations now manages buckets or prefixes in a single step
Amazon S3 Batch Operations has enhanced its capability to handle objects within an S3 bucket, whether based on a specific prefix, suffix, or other criteria, all in a single step. When initiating an S3 Batch Operation, users can now define the target objects for the operation. Alternatively, users can opt to target an entire bucket, specify a prefix, suffix, creation date, or storage class. Subsequently, Amazon S3 Batch Operations will efficiently execute the operation across all the relevant objects and provide notifications upon job completion.
Other announcements:
Automatic restore testing and validation now available in AWS Backup
AWS released a new feature in AWS Backup that gives the ability to test the backup to assure customers can restore and able to automate restoration testing. The service is available in Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Aurora, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Elastic File Store (Amazon EFS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon FSx, Amazon DocumentDB, and Amazon Neptune.
This service is similar to Veeam SureBackup® service that allows you to test machine backups and verify if you can recover data from them
New Storage Class for Amazon EFS
New addition to Amazon Elastic Filesystem – EFS Archive. This new class gives customers the ability to lower the File System cost for data that is rarely accessed and automate the lifecycle of the files so ones that are not used often will automatically migrate between storage classes.
Veeam is backing up Amazon EFS with Veeam Backup for AWS using AWS Backup Vault.
Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP Enhancements
New announcement with FSx for NetApp ONTAP brings significant performance improvement to the fully managed low latency primary storage. Veeam can backup FSx ONTAP as any other filesystem by an NFS mount and backup to Object Storage using Veeam Backup and Replication v12 or above.
IAM Access Analyzer updates: Find unused access, check policies before deployment
A new analyzer continuously monitors roles and users looking for permissions that are granted but not actually used, and a policy checker validates that newly authored policies do not grant additional (and perhaps unintended) permissions.
Amazon S3 Access Grants
This feature enables users to link identities from directories like Microsoft Entra (formerly Microsoft Azure AD) and Okta to datasets within Amazon S3. This facilitates the streamlined management of data permissions on a larger scale by automatically assigning appropriate Amazon S3 access to end-users based on their corporate identities. S3 Access Grants can be seamlessly integrated with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), serving as a convenient and scalable method to complement existing resource-level controls in Amazon S3, such as S3 bucket policies. Furthermore, S3 Access Grants meticulously log the end-user identity and the application used for accessing Amazon S3 data in AWS CloudTrail, offering a comprehensive audit trail for all data access activities in S3 buckets.
A complete list of released products from AWS can be found HERE.
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