Fault tolerance enables your cloud infrastructure to continue functioning properly in the event of one or multiple failures within the cloud components. In simpler words, the whole system is not supposed to stop even if there is a fault in any of its components. Backup, recovery, and high availability are the most infamous issues that happen in cloud. Dynamic service infrastructure, complex configurations and various interdependencies of resources exist in cloud. It is therefore important to implement certain best practices to make your Amazon RDS databases fault tolerant to unexpected failures.
Setting backup retention period for your Amazon RDS instances
AWS provides its users with the facility of automated backups of RDS instances. Automated backups help in the seamless recovery of the database instance. Amazon Relational Database Service can retain these automated backups for a certain time-period known as the retention period. AWS allows you to change the default backup retention period of 7 days to a maximum of 35 days. This facility is essential for situations when there is an unexpected fault or an outage in your RDS database instances. Also, to avoid data loss and hampering of day-to-day operations, the automated backup becomes an effective method of backing up your databases.
How you can leverage Centilytics:
Centilytics provides a useful insight into the backup retention period of your Amazon RDS instances. It warns you whenever a database instance with 0 backup retention days is detected in your cloud infrastructure.
Insight descriptions:
There can be 1 possible scenario:
| Severity | Description |
 Critical |
This indication will be displayed when an Amazon RDS instance has backup retention period set to zero. This means that no automated backup is taking place |
Description of further columns are as follows:
- Account Id: This column shows the respective account ID of the user’s account.
- Account Name: This column shows the Account Id of the user’s account
- Region: This column shows the region in which the resources exist.
- Availability Zone: This column shows the availability zone in which the resource exists.
- DB instance identifier: This column shows the name of the database.
- Retention period: This column shows the retention period for which the backup will be taken.
- Identifier: This column shows the ARN (Amazon Resource Number) of the resource.
Filters applicable:
| Filter Name | Description |
| Account Id | Applying the account Id filter will display data for the selected account Id. |
| Region | Applying the region filter will display data according to the selected region. |
| Severity | Applying severity filter will display data according to the selected severity type i.e. selecting critical will display all resources with critical severity. Same will be the case for warning and ok severity types |
| Resource Tags | Applying resource tags filter will display those resources which have been assigned the selected resource tag. For e.g., If the user has tagged some resource by a tag named environment, then selecting an environment from the resource tags filter will display all the resources tagged with the tag name environment. |
| Resource Tags Value | Applying resource tags value filter will display data which will have the selected resource tag value. For e.g. – Let’s say a user has tagged some resource by a tag named environment and has a value say production (environment: production). Hence, the user can view data of all the resources which are tagged as “environment:production”. The user can use the tag value filter only when a tag name has been provided. |
Compliances covered:
| Compliance Name | Reference No. | Link |
| Trusted Advisor | – | https://console.aws.amazon.com/trustedadvisor/home?#/category/fault-tolerance |
To get an in-depth understanding of AWS RDS, read our insider piece.