Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager
Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager provides an automated way to manage the lifecycle of your AWS resources. Using lifecycle policies, you can automate the creation, retention, and deletion of Amazon EBS snapshots and EBS-backed AMIs, reducing storage costs and simplifying backup management. Policies target EBS volumes and EC2 instances using tags, execute on configurable schedules, and apply flexible retention rules based on count or age.
APIs
Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager API
The Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager API enables programmatic management of lifecycle policies for automating the creation, retention, and deletion of EBS snapshots and AMIs to mee...
Capabilities
Features
Automatically create, copy, and delete EBS snapshots on configurable schedules using tag-based targeting of volumes across AWS accounts.
Automate the creation and deregistration of Amazon Machine Images from EC2 instances on schedules to maintain a library of AMIs.
Retain snapshots by count (keep the last N) or by age (keep for N days/weeks/months/years), automatically deleting older snapshots.
Target EBS volumes or EC2 instances using resource tags for policy scope, enabling granular backup control without managing resource lists.
Configure schedules to copy snapshots to other AWS regions for disaster recovery and geographic redundancy automatically.
Enable fast snapshot restore on snapshots created by DLM policies to dramatically reduce EBS volume initialization time.
Trigger snapshot sharing and copying workflows in response to CloudWatch Events for cross-account snapshot automation.
Use Cases
Schedule daily EBS volume snapshots with automated retention of the last 7 or 30 days of backups without manual intervention.
Meet regulatory backup retention requirements by defining long-term retention policies (monthly/yearly) for compliance snapshots.
Automatically copy EBS snapshots to secondary AWS regions to enable cross-region disaster recovery with minimal RTO and RPO.
Automate the creation of hardened EC2 AMI images from approved instances and manage their lifecycle for deployment fleets.
Reduce EBS snapshot storage costs by automatically deleting outdated snapshots based on configurable age or count retention rules.
Integrations
Native integration with Amazon EBS for snapshot creation, retention, and deletion of volumes across the AWS account.
Target EC2 instances with IMAGE_MANAGEMENT policies to automate AMI creation from running or stopped instances.
Event-based DLM policies are triggered by Amazon CloudWatch Events for cross-account snapshot sharing scenarios.
Complementary to DLM, AWS Backup provides centralized backup management across multiple AWS services including EBS, RDS, and DynamoDB.
DLM uses IAM execution roles to assume permissions for creating and deleting snapshots on behalf of the lifecycle policy.
Cross-account snapshot sharing policies use AWS Organizations to share EBS snapshots with member accounts automatically.