Earlier this year Veeam acquired N2WS after announcements last year of a technology partnership at VeeamON 2017. The more I tinker with Cloud Protection Manager the more I understand why we made the acquisition. N2WS was founded in 2012 with their first product shipping in 2013. Purpose built for AWS supporting all types of EC2 instances, EBS volumes, RDS, DynamoDB & Redshift and AMI creation and distributed as an AMI through the AWS Marketplace. The product is easy to deploy and has extended it’s feature set with the release of 2.3d announced during VeeamON 2018 a couple weeks ago.

From the datasheet:

Cloud Protection Manager (CPM) is an enterprise-class backup, recovery, and disaster recovery solution purpose-built for Amazon Web Services EC2 environments. CPM enhances AWS data protection with automated and flexible backup policies, application consistent backups, 1-click instant recovery, and disaster recovery to other AWS region or AWS accounts ensuring cloud resiliency for the largest production AWS environment. By extending and enhancing native AWS capabilities, CPM protects the valuable data and mission-critical applications in the AWS cloud.

In this post, I wanted to show how easy it is to deploy and install Cloud Protection Manager as well as look at some of the new features in the 2.3d release. I will do a follow up post going into more detail about how to protect AWS Instances and services with CPM.

What’s new with CPM 2.3:

  • Automated backup for Amazon DynamoDB: CPM provides backup and recovery for Amazon DynamoDB, you can now apply existing policies and schedules to backup and restore their DynamoDB tables and metadata.
  • RESTful API:  Completely automate backup and recovery operations with the new Cloud Protection Manager API. This feature provides seamless integration between CPM and other applications.
  • Enhanced reporting features: Enhancements include the ability to gather all reports in one tab, run as a CSV, view both protected and unprotected resources and include new filtering options as well.

Other new features that come as part of the CPM 2.3 release include full cross-region and cross-account disaster recovery for Aurora databases, enhanced permissions for users and a fast and efficient on boarding process using CloudFormation’s 1-click template.

Installing, Configuring and Managing CPM:

The process to install Cloud Protection Manager from the AWS Marketplace is seamless and can be done via a couple different methods including a 1-Click deployment. The offical install guide can be read here. The CPM EC2 instance is deployed into a new or existing VPC configured with a subnet and must be put into an existing, or new Security Group.

Once deployed you are given the details of the installation.

And you can see it from the AWS Console under the EC2 instances. I’ve added a name for the instance just for clarities sake.

One thing to note is that there is no public IP assigned to the instance as part of the deployment. You can create a new Elastic IP and attach it to the instance, or you can access the configuration website via it’s internal IP if you have access to the subnet via some form of VPN or network extension.

There is an initial configuration wizard that guides you through the registration and setup of CPM. Note that you do need internet connectivity to complete the process otherwise you will get this error.

The final step will allow you to configure a volume for CPM use. With that the wizard finalises the setup and you can log into the Cloud Protection Manager.

Conclusion: 

The ability to backup AWS services natively has it’s advantages over traditional methods such as agents. Cloud Protection Manager from N2WS can be installed and ready to go within 5 minutes. In the next post, i’ll walk through the CPM interface and show how you backup and recover AWS instances and services.

References:

https://n2ws.com/cpm-install-guide

https://support.n2ws.com/portal/kb/articles/release-notes-for-the-latest-v2-3-x-cpm-release