You have asked and waited patiently. We have worked and tweaked and now we can proudly present the beta version of our very own Snapshot feature!
Introducing new features is always tricky, to be honest we want to deliver everything yesterday. To ensure the features work as intended, it is, however, necessary to prioritize and focus. Most importantly, it sometimes takes some tweaking and testing to guarantee the stability and performance of a new feature in any a cloud provider distributed environment.
The Snapshot feature has now reached the beta stage. During the beta stage you will not be charged for using Snapshot, but you will be limited to 5 Snapshots per user. If you need more than that, contact us and we’ll work something out.
What’s the point with Snapshots?
At this point in time, the main function of the Snapshot feature is to provide a fast (it only takes seconds!) point of recovery that can be created on both live and stopped instances and used later for a rollback. It can not be used for backup or restoration of individual files, however. It is for the instance disc as a whole.
In the fullness of time, the Snapshot function will also have features like scheduling and promotion of one specific Snapshot to be a template for new instances. This will make deployment of new instances with the same setup as an earlier one, much faster and easier. This is the major benefit of the Snapshot feature. That is however, a little ways away.
How do you use the Snapshot feature?
- Step 1: Go to the Instance detail screen
- Step 2: Click on “Create Snapshot”
- Step 3: If you need to do a rollback, just click on the revert button!
You can find more details in our documentation. It’s also possible to use the feature through our API (See the documentation) if you prefer that.
Suggestions for other features? We’d love to hear! We will of course continue to develop our services and add features. There is nobody who knows better than you, which features would be most useful. If you have a suggestion, don’t hesitate to contact us via the contact form at https://www.exoscale.com/contact/, on twitter (@exoscale) or through our Facebook page. We’ll love to hear your thoughts!