amazon web services - AWS - RDS - Restoring database from snapshot everyday

Question

I wonder if It is possible to restore database on AWS from snapshot everyday in specific time? I'm not meaning creating new instance, just restoring database to have default data.

I need this becouse I wrote some Django app and put her on Heroku. People can add there some records and making some kind of mess. I want restore database everyday to "clean" site from unecessery data everyday.

Thanks

Answer 1

There's nothing stopping you from doing that.

I'd build it the following way:

1. Create a CNAME record to point to the DNS record of the current database instance
2. Reference that CNAME in your application
3. Create a lambda that triggers daily
4. Use that Lambda to create a new database instance from the known-good snapshot
5. Afterwards the lambda should update the CNAME record from 1) to point to the new instance
6. Then delete the old instance without making a final snapshot

You can leverage AWS Step Functions to orchestrate 4-6, because database operations take time and lambda runtime is finite.

Alternatively you can export the known good state of the DB as an SQL statement (research: sqldump) and then write a lambda function that gets triggered once per day, drops the old schema and creates a new schema from the known-good dump.

If the database is small, I'd go with the second alternative. For larger ones, I'd probably stick with the first. Beware that the second one will have a brief period where the application doesn't have access to a functioning database.