Posted On: Apr 26, 2024

Customers can now create and manage default policies across their entire organization or organizational unit (OU) with AWS CloudFormation StackSets. Default policies work in conjunction with customers’ existing backup mechanisms to only create EBS-backed AMIs and EBS Snapshots of instances and volumes without recent backups. This helps administrators ensure that all member accounts have comprehensive backup protection without creating duplicate backups or increasing management overhead and cost. 

Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager default policies target instances and/or volumes in a region and will automate the creation and retention of backups for resources which have not been recently backed-up. Customers can set their default policy to exclude non-critical workloads by specifying exclusion parameters such as volume type, resource tags, and boot volumes. Now with CloudFormation StackSets and the provided sample templates, administrators can easily create and manage default policies in all AWS Regions and in all member accounts to ensure they are all compliant with the organization’s back up requirements.

Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager default policies and the CloudFormation StackSets sample template for default policies are available in all AWS Regions. There is no cost associated with creating and managing these policies. Customers only pay for the storage cost associated with any EBS Snapshots that are created.

The CloudFormation StackSets sample templates to “Create and manage default policies for EBS Snapshots and EBS-backed Amazon Machine Images (AMIs)” are now available through the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, or the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI). To learn about this feature, read the blogpost and our documentation