Recently AWS announced that its Outposts service now supports Amazon Elastic Block Store (ESB) local snapshots. With Amazon EBS Local Snapshots on Outposts, customers can store snapshots of their Amazon EBS volumes locally on Amazon S3 on Outposts to meet their data residency and local data processing needs. The snapshots are point-in-time copies of data that can be used to enable disaster recovery and improve backup compliance.
Earlier, Amazon EBS snapshots on Outposts were stored by default on Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) in the AWS Region. Now, if customers provision Outposts with Amazon S3 on Outposts, a new storage class designed to durably and redundantly store data on Outposts, they have the option to keep their snapshots locally on their Outpost. Furthermore, with the option, customers can easily meet regulatory, contractual, or information security requirements in cases where data need to remain in a particular country, state, or municipality.
Through the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), and AWS SDKs, users can create and manage EBS Local Snapshots on Outposts. And they can also continue to take snapshots of EBS volumes on Outposts, which are stored in S3 in the associated parent Region. Furthermore, they can also use Amazon Data Life Cycle Manager (DLM) to define policies to automate snapshots' lifecycle management on Outposts.
Source: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-elastic-block-store-local-snapshots-on-aws-outposts/
Note that copying of local snapshots on Outposts to the parent AWS Region is not supported. In case customers face scenarios where data residency is required, they can only create local snapshots or copy snapshots from the parent Region. Channy Yun, a principal developer advocate for AWS, wrote in an AWS News blog post on the new capability in Outposts:
With the newly launched availability of EBS Local Snapshots on Outposts, you can migrate, replicate and recover workloads from any sources directly into Outposts, or between Outposts devices, without requiring the EBS snapshot data to go through a public region, leading to lower latencies, greater performance, and reduced costs. Supported use cases related to Outposts for migration and disaster recovery include: from on-premises to Outposts, from public AWS Regions into Outposts, from Outposts into public AWS Regions, and between two Outposts devices.
Currently, Amazon EBS Local Snapshots capability on Outposts is now available in all AWS commercial regions where AWS Outposts is available. More details of the new capability are available on the documentation page.
