Automate the creation and deletion of EC2 snapshots via AWS CLI 2

We're heavily using AWS and we're scripting everything we can. As AWS CLI 2 came out recently we needed to update our scripts.

This script creates a new snapshot and deletes all snapshots older than 2 weeks, for a specific volume.


### create-snapshot-and-cleanup.sh

```bash
#!/bin/bash

DESCRIPTION="example.com"
VOLUME="vol-xxxxxxxxxx"

SNAPSHOT_AGE=$(date +%Y-%m-%d --date '2 weeks ago')
TODAY=$(date +%d-%m-%Y)

echo "Creating new snapshot of volume $VOLUME."
aws ec2 create-snapshot --output text --description "$DESCRIPTION - AutoSnapshot $TODAY" --volume-id $VOLUME >> /dev/null

echo "Deleting snapshots older than: $SNAPSHOT_AGE"

snapshots=$(aws ec2 describe-snapshots --output text --filters Name=volume-id,Values=$VOLUME --query "Snapshots[?StartTime<'$SNAPSHOT_AGE'].SnapshotId")

echo "Snapshots sheduled for deletion: $snapshots"

for snapshot in $snapshots; do
  echo "Deleting $snapshot ..."
  aws ec2 delete-snapshot --snapshot-id $snapshot
done
```

Zeno Popovici
12 Aug 2021