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Accepted
Tom Feiner
Asked: 2012-01-10 01:06:08 +0800 CST

How to programmatically migrate an EC2 EBS AMI to other regions?

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Before EBS based AMIs were available, it was possible to use the command ec2-migrate-image in order to migrate AMIs to different regions.

Is there a simple way to do the same for EBS based AMIs? Either using the official amazon EC2 API command line tools or using a library like boto?

amazon-ec2 amazon-web-services amazon-ebs

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Amazon has not provided a simple command line interface to copy EBS boot AMIs between regions like they did with S3 based AMIs.

    In order to copy an EBS boot AMI, you need to start instances in both regions and copy the EBS snapshot from one region to the other using a temporary EBS volume attached to each instance.

    I recommend using rsync with appropriate options to copy the file system, instead of copying the block device, as this is faster and should result in a smaller snapshot.

    After the new snapshot has been created in the new region, you register it as an AMI, making sure you specify the correct architecture/AKI/ARI matching the ones in the source region.

    I've written up the specific command lines necessary to accomplish all of this:

    Copying EBS Boot AMIs Between EC2 Regions
    http://alestic.com/2010/10/ec2-ami-copy

    It is possible to put this together into an automated process, if that's what you need.

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  2. copy-image command of AWS CLI does exactly what you need

    https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/appstream/copy-image.html?highlight=image

    Just put it like that

    copy-image --source-image-name img --destination-image-name img_new --destination-region us-west-1
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