Today I spent some time figuring out how to move EBS-backed AMIs between different EC2 regions. To save you the effort, here’s a quick summary:

• create a volume from the snapshot backing the AMI
• attach this volume to a running instance and mount it
• create a new volume in the target region
• attach to a running instance, format and mount
• in the source region, connect to your instance
• rsync (over ssh, so no messing with security groups) the mounted volume to the target volume
• once the rsync is done, create a snapshot in the target region
• register this snapsho as new AMI with ec2-register

Not rocket science, but definitely not as good as just being able to share your own AMIs between regions…

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