Today I would like to tell you about a new cross-account snapshot sharing feature for Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). You can share the snapshots with specific AWS accounts or you can make them public.

Cross-Account Snapshot Sharing

I often create snapshot backups as part of my RDS demos:

The snapshots are easy to create and can be restored to a fresh RDS database instance with a couple of clicks.

Today’s big news is that you can now share unencrypted MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, and PostgreSQL snapshots with other AWS accounts. If you, like many sophisticated AWS customers, use separate AWS accounts for development, testing, and production, you can now share snapshots between AWS accounts in a controlled fashion. If a late-breaking bug is discovered in a production system, you can create a database snapshot and then share it with select developers so that they can diagnose the problem without having to have access to the production account or system.

Each snapshot can be shared with up to 20 other accounts (we can raise this limit for your account if necessary; just ask). You can also mark snapshots as public so that any RDS user can restore a database containing your data. This is a great way to share data sets and research results!

Here is how you share a snapshot with another AWS account using the RDS Console (you can also do this from the command line or the RDS API):

Here’s how a snapshot appears in the accounts that it is shared with (again, this functionality is also accessible from the command line and the RDS API):

Here is how you create a public snapshot:

Snapshot sharing works across regions, but does not apply to the China (Beijing) region or to AWS GovCloud (US).

— Jeff;