For regular agile admin readers, I wanted to point out the post I did on the Bazaarvoice engineering blog, How Bazaarvoice Weathered The AWS Storm, on how we have designed for resiliency to the point where we had zero end user facing downtime during last year’s AWS meltdown and Leapocalypse. It’s a bit late, I wrote it like in July and then the BV engineering blog kinda fell dormant (guy who ran it left, etc.) and we’re just getting it reinvigorated. Anyway, go read the article and also watch that blog for more good stuff to come!
Tag Archives: region
Moving Your Amazon EC2 AMIs To Another Region
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!
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