Migrate AMI to different Region


Migrating AMI, whether its an intance store or ebs based to different regions is a time consuming process depending on the network speed. There are situations, where we require an instance to be migrated. The article is not written for newbies as I believe, if you are trying to learn ami migration, it means you are already well aware of creating ami's and other concepts and doesn't requires a detailed instruction other than the steps.

The basic principle behind the migration is to “transfer files to the required S3 region”.

You cannot simply transfer an EBS AMI to different region. Following steps seems to be the easiest method for migrating an EBS backed ami. Same method is applicable to Instance-store ami.

  1. Launch an EBS AMI

  2. Attach an extra EBS volume if the space on root ebs volume is low.

  3. Create the image using ec2-bundle-vol

  4. Create a bucket in required region

  5. Run ec2-migrate-manifest

  6. Using s3cmd, upload the files created by ec2-bundle-vol to the new region bucket. S3cmd seems to be very fast to upload rather than using ec2-upload-bundle command.

  7. Register the ami using an AKI available in that region.