A while back, I did a post on creating snapshots of EC2 instances with Powershell here. Well, in November, AWS released an option to do VSS-aware snapshots via SSM. You’ll find AWS’ post about that here.
From the AWS post…
To create VSS-enabled EBS snapshots by using AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell:
Send-SSMCommand -DocumentName AWSEC2-CreateVssSnapshots -InstanceId “$instance” -Parameter @{‘ExcludeBootVolume’=’False’;’description’=’a_description‘ ;’tags’=’Key=key_name,Value=tag_value‘}
An interesting thing to note about this:
“The system flushes all I/O buffers and temporarily pauses all I/O operations. The pause lasts, at most, ten seconds…”
So, there can be some non-ideal side effects depending on your working if running these at peak performance times, but its nothing proper planning can’t work around.
