ylastic blog - Filed under 'snapshot'

The next generation tools for leveraging Cloud Services Environments such as AWS and Eucalyptus. Spend your precious time focusing on bringing your ideas to life rather than dealing with the daily nitty gritty of the different services. Manage your cloud the way you want - laptop, desktop, tablet or mobile smartphone.

ylastic's profile »

Filed under

snapshot

August 9, 2011

Amazon EBS Snapshots in the EU-West Region

AWS has discovered a bug in their software that cleans up EBS snapshots in the EU West region. They are contacting customers that have snapshots affected by this bug. Here is the email that some of our customers are receiving:

Hello,
We've discovered an error in the Amazon EBS software that cleans up unused snapshots. This has affected at least one of your snapshots in the EU-West Region.
During a recent run of this EBS software in the EU-West Region, one or more blocks in a number of EBS snapshots were incorrectly deleted. The root cause was a software error that caused the snapshot references to a subset of blocks to be missed during the reference counting process. This process compares the blocks scheduled for deletion to the blocks referenced in customer snapshots. As a result of the software error, the EBS snapshot management system in the EU-West Region incorrectly thought some of the blocks were no longer being used and deleted them. We've addressed the error in the EBS snapshot system to prevent it from recurring.
We have now disabled all of your snapshots that contain these missing blocks. You can determine which of your snapshots were affected via the AWS Management Console or the DescribeSnapshots API call. The status for any affected snapshots will be shown as "error."
We have created copies of your affected snapshots where we've replaced the missing blocks with empty blocks. You can create a new volume from these snapshot copies and run a recovery tool on it (e.g. a file system recovery tool like fsck); in some cases this may restore normal volume operation. These snapshots can be identified via the snapshot Description field which you can see on the AWS Management Console or via the DescribeSnapshots API call. The Description field contains "Recovery Snapshot snap-xxxx" where snap-xxx is the id of the affected snapshot. Alternately, if you have any older or more recent snapshots that were unaffected, you will be able to create a volume from those snapshots without error. For additional questions, you may open a case in our Support Center: https://aws.amazon.com/support/createCase
We apologize for any potential impact this might have on your applications.
Sincerely,
AWS Developer Support

Filed under // EC2 Ireland aws bug ebs outage snapshot

Comments [0]

May 9, 2011

Migrating XFS based AMI and snapshots between EC2 regions

Ylastic can now migrate your XFS based images and snapshots between regions. To demo this migration, we used the wonderful new git server AMIs from Eric Hammond and Alestic.

You get an email once the migration is complete. You can check the migrations page too for the current status. Launch the new AMI, and a few minutes later, here's the console output.

Migration with a single click :-)

Filed under // ami aws migration regions snapshot xfs

Comments [0]

May 2, 2011

Migrating snapshots between EC2 regions

Since the recent AWS outage, we have been getting a lot of requests for migrating snapshots between EC2 regions. Here we go - super simple migration of your snapshots.

Select a snapshot, provide a description, and click a button. Ylastic will migrate the snapshot and send you an email once the process is complete.

Windows EBS snapshot support as well as multi-partitioned filesystem support in the works. Enjoy :-)

Filed under // EC2 aws migration regions snapshot

Comments [7]

March 23, 2011

EC2 tag cloud and Multi-resource tagging

EC2 gives you the ability to assign meaningful metadata to your resources using tags, which are simple key-value pairs. We use tags quite a bit here at Ylastic, and needed a way to do tagging for multiple resources across all regions. We also wanted something that was easy on the eyes, and reduced the drudgery of mass tagging. Tags, something visual, simple to use - Tagcloud!

The terms in the cloud are displayed in a font that is weighted to visually indicate the number of times it occurs in your tag values. The terms will start moving around the cloud if your mouse is inside the tag cloud, and will stop when the mouse leaves the cloud. Click a value to get a grouped display of all matching EC2 resources with that tag value. Did we mention it will display all matching resources, across all regions? Click a group heading to go to the corresponding Ylastic page for that resource type.

Tag a whole bunch of resources with a click.

Click a button to edit a tag value and apply the change to all matching resources, across regions. If you have multiple keys with the same value, you can pick the key that you want to change :-)

Removing a tag is as simple as clicking a button.

Tags are very cool, manage them the easy way !

Filed under // EC2 aws image instance regions snapshot tagcloud tags volume

Comments [0]