Over the past few weeks and months, I have been having a lot of conversations with people about automation and the use of tags within AWS. Tags within AWS are nothing new, and AWS provides a vast amount of information on how to use them.
First of all lets think of a use case for AWS tags. Backups are a good use case. You can easily apply an AWS tag to an EC2 instance so that you know whether this should be part of a backup policy or not. For example, you can create a simple tag called backup and have true or false as the value.
AWS has a number of documents that are really helpful to understand what tags are and how they can be used. I have listed two of my favourites here:
With the recent release of Veeam Backup for AWS, a lot of talk has been around how can I automatically add these tagged instances to my backup policies. Well its pretty simple actually. For every instance you have in EC2 simply add a tag. Create a policy within Veeam Backup for AWS and specify the resources as a tag.
Pretty simple. Now every instance you want to automatically add to your backup policy, just add the tag backup true to it and it will always be included in the policy.
This is a really great way to protect instances as they are migrated to AWS EC2 from on-prem or other cloud providers. By automatically adding a tag you never need to worry about forgetting to apply the backup policy.
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