Recently I need to migrate my infrastructure from Tokyo to Singapore. According to the information I gathered from AWS 201 course, it’s a little troublesome to migrate AWS AMI between regions.

As Copying EBS Boot AMIs Between EC2 Regions demostrated, we need to mount ebs for each regions and rsync them, than we register the ebs as AMI; Also there’s CloudyScript, it’s a online tool that does these steps for you.

After some study, I found that it’s not necessary now. Amazon announced EBS Snapshot Copy last December. Although you can’t migrate AMI but we could do so just for some more steps.

It’s really simple:

Find the snapshot or your AMI, click Copy Snapshot to copy snapshot to your destinated region.

Check the Kernel ID field of your AMI.

Visit the cloud market to check AKI’s description to see which manifest.xml it belongs. For instance: pv-grub-hd0_1.02-x86_64.gz.manifest.xml

Search for pv-grub-hd0_1.02-x86_64.gz.manifest.xml and find the AKI for your destinated region.

Perform Create Image from Snapshot on your cloned snapshot.

Select the AKI you just got.

You don’t need to rsync anything. It’s just that easy!