AWS releases a new service with a lot of marketing noise. You can’t resist, you want to use that new thing now. But soon you discover that the service is missing essential features. As a result, you stumble upon a show stopper and get frustrated. Why is that? AWS ships new services with a lot of limitations and rough edges. That’s a good strategy for AWS to get early feedback. But it’s painful for us, the customer.

Therefore, we start a little series where we review new AWS services to give you a more balanced view of the capabilities. We start with AWS Backup.

AWS Backup aims to become a centralized place for managing backups. If possible, AWS Backup uses existing features to create backups (e.g., RDS snapshots). Sometimes, AWS Backup is the only way to create a backup (e.g., EFS file systems).