Here’s what I found out the hard way during the Amazon outage when I wanted to migrate my systems to a different region.
You can’t use your AMIs or other assets in a region different from the ones they were created in. You can’t use your security groups or keypairs or EBSes, you have to migrate or recreate all of them, yay. Some methods to do this follow.
Manual method:
- Better one but the Web page is down when Amazon is: http://alestic.com/2010/10/ec2-ami-copy
- Harder one http://blog.ibd.com/scalable-deployment/copy-an-ebs-ami-image-to-another-amazon-ec2-region/
Automated:
- Using Cloudyscripts https://cloudyscripts.com/tool/show/5
- Source code here http://rubygems.org/gems/CloudyScripts (no one in their right mind should use the online script and give their Amazon credentials to someone)
Paying Money:
Of course what the answer should be is “click a button in the Amazon console or invoke the Amazon API to say “move ami-xxxxx to region y” done.
In the end none of these were working during the outage because they all rely on the ability to bring up an instance/EBS in the source region. We then rebuilt images from scratch in us-west but looks like east is back online now just as we’re finishing with that. So plan ahead!
And finally Amazon supports it natively in the console! Read http://www.newvem.com/how-to-migrate-copy-ec2-instance-between-amazon-aws-regions/ for more.
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Here is the link to article how to transfer EC2 not only between regions but also between different account:
http://blog.ecloudgate.com/how-to-transfer-ec2-instances-between-aws-accounts/