New – Cross-Account Snapshot Sharing for Amazon Aurora

Amazon Aurora is a high-performance, MySQL-compatible database engine. Aurora combines the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effective of open source databases (see my post, Amazon Aurora – New Cost-Effective MySQL-Compatible Database Engine for Amazon RDS, to learn more). Aurora shares some important attributes with the other database engines that are available for Amazon RDS including easy administration, push-button scalability, speed, security, and cost-effectiveness.

You can create a snapshot backup of an Aurora cluster with just a couple of clicks. After you have created a snapshot, you can use it to restore your database, once again with a couple of clicks.

Share Snapshots
Today we are giving you the ability to share your Aurora snapshots. You can share them with other AWS accounts and you can also make them public. These snapshots can be used to restore the database to an Aurora instance running in a separate AWS account in the same Region as the snapshot.

There are several primary use cases for snapshot sharing:

Separation of Environments – Many AWS customers use separate AWS accounts for their development, test, staging, and production environments. You can share snapshots between these accounts as needed. For example, you can generate the initial database in your staging environment, snapshot it, share the snapshot with your production account, and then use it to create your production database. Or, should you encounter an issue with your production code or queries, you can create a snapshot of your production database and then share it with your test account for debugging and remediation.

Partnering – You can share database snapshots with selected partners on an as-needed basis.

Data Dissemination -If you are running a research project, you can generate snapshots and then share them publicly. Interested parties can then create their own Aurora databases using the snapshots, using your work and your data as a starting point.

To share a snapshot, simply select it in the RDS Console and click on Share Snapshot. Then enter the target AWS account (or click on Public to share the snapshot publicly) and click on Add:

You can share manually generated, unencrypted snapshots with other AWS accounts or publicly. You cannot share automatic snapshots or encrypted snapshots.

The shared snapshot becomes visible in the other account right away:

Public snapshots are also visible (select All Public Snapshots as the Filter):

Available Now
This feature is available now and you can start using it today.

— Jeff;