Amazon is now supporting DynamoDB Backups and restore, although currently only in limited regions. Over the next few weeks the areas covered will be expanded in the United States and beyond. Skeddly has also announced that its platform now supports DynamoDB backups.
The announcement about the new feature was made by Amazon at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. While Amazon has made it possible to create full backups of DynamoDB tables, the new feature will take some time to be fully rolled out. At present the On-Demand Backup feature is only available in limited regions in the United States and Ireland, although in early 2018, Amazon expects this feature to be available in all regions.
At the time of writing, On-Demand Backup is only available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland). Amazon notes that in early 2018, users will be able to opt-in to DynamoDB Point-in-Time Restore (PITR) which will allow a restore to be completed to any point in the previous 35 days. The restore feature creates up to the minute backups, which will help users prevent data loss caused by application errors.
This new feature has also been incorporated into Skeddly, although naturally, On-Demand Backup is similarly limited to the above regions. Skeddly notes that backups will fail unless DynamoDB tables are in the above regions until Amazon expands the supported regions.
Amazon added its On-Demand Backup feature prior to the announcement at AWS re:Invent, but the feature will only be available on tables that were created after the announcement. Amazon will include the backup feature on older tables, although it will take some time for that feature to be rolled out. Until the feature is rolled out, users will see the following message in their AWS Management Console when they attempt to create a backup of an older table: “Backup is being enabled for this table. Please revisit this page sometime later.”
Note that at present, it is not possible to copy DynamoDB backups to secondary regions and the backups do not support tags (cost allocation tags for instance). Copy support and tags are expected to be added soon.
Full support for DynamoDB backups on the Skeddly platform is not expected until early 2018.