Worker Instance Locations

To minimize cross-region traffic charges and to speed up the data transfer, depending on the data protection and disaster recovery operation, backup appliances deploy worker instances in the following locations:

Worker Instance Locations
Operation	Worker Instance Location	Possibility to Deploy Worker Instances in Production Accounts	Default Worker Instance Type
Creating EC2 image-level backups	AWS Region in which a processed EC2 instance resides	Yes	c5.large — if the total EBS volume size is less than 1024 GB c5.2xlarge — if the total EBS volume size is 1024 GB - 16 TB c5.4xlarge — if the total EBS volume size is more than 16 TB
Restoring EC2 instances from image-level backups	AWS Region to which an EC2 instance is restored	Yes
Restoring EC2 volumes from image-level backups	AWS Region to which the volumes of a processed EC2 instance are restored	Yes
Performing health check for EC2 backups	AWS Region in which a backup repository with backed-up data resides	No
Creating EC2 archived backups	AWS Region in which a standard backup repository with backed-up data resides	No	c5.2xlarge
Performing file-level recovery from image-level backups	AWS Region in which a backup repository with backed-up data resides	No	t3.medium
Performing file-level recovery from cloud-native snapshots and replicated snapshots	AWS Region in which a snapshot is located	No (if restoring to the original location) Yes (if restoring to a local machine)	t3.medium
Creating RDS image-level backups	AWS Region and VPC in which a processed PostgreSQL DB instance resides	Deploying worker instances in production accounts is the only available option.	c5.large — if the total EBS volume size is less than 80 GB c5.xlarge — if the total storage size is more than 80 GB
Performing health check for RDS backups	AWS Region in which a backup repository with backed-up data resides	No	c5.large
Creating RDS archived backups	AWS Region in which a standard backup repository with backed-up data resides	No	c5.2xlarge
Restoring databases of Microsoft SQL Server and PostgreSQL DB instances from image-level backups	AWS Region and VPC in which the restored DB instance databases will reside	Deploying worker instances in production accounts is the only available option.	c5.large
Performing EFS indexing	AWS Region, Availability Zone and VPC in which a file system has a mount target created	Deploying worker instances in production accounts is the only available option.	t3.medium
Applying retention policy settings to created restore points	AWS Region in which a backup repository with backed-up data resides	No	c5.large — if the total size of backup files that must be deleted is 1-3 TB c5.xlarge — if the total size of backup files that must be deleted is 3-6 TB c5.2xlarge — if the total size of backup files that must be deleted is 6-13 TB c5.4xlarge — if the total size of backup files that must be deleted is more than 13 TB

Note

To optimize the cost of running worker instances, the backup appliance first attempts to use the c6a or c6i instance family for default worker profiles, depending on availability at the worker instance location. If neither instance family is available, the backup appliance uses the instance types listed in the table above.

Note that this behavior does not apply to the default worker profile used to deploy worker instances that perform EC2 file-level recovery and EFS indexing.

Worker instances are deployed based on worker configurations and profiles. For more information, see Managing Worker Instances.