Reduce Amazon Charges and Increase B2S3 Throughput Utilizing an HTTPS Proxy in EC2
As part of our 15.07 product release, Zadara Storage now offers the ability to backup snapshots of your volumes to S3, or to any S3 API compatible object store. This provides a cost effective, infinitely scalable storage destination for your volume backups, all from an integrated solution right in your VPSA.
When backing up to Amazon’s S3 service, there are two options:
- Send backup traffic through the Internet to Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 from a VPSA with a public IP assigned.
- Send backup traffic via Direct Connect through an EC2 virtual machine in your AWS VPC, then on to S3.
Sending through the Internet is encrypted and secure, but has some disadvantages:
- Throughput will be limited to the amount of bandwidth available to the Internet line in that region.
- AWS charges when reading files from S3 to an external (Internet) source. These charges can quickly surpass the cost of transferring to your VPSA through Direct Connect. AWS pricing table is here: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/
HTTPS Proxy
Therefore, when backing up to S3 with your AWS Direct Connect attached VPSA, it is ideal to utilize an HTTPS proxy. Doing so circumvents any throughput bottlenecks as well as potentially saves you money when restoring your backups.
Visually, the workflow looks like this:
For further instructions on setting up an HTTPS proxy for B2S3 usage, please refer to our support site article.
