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Edgar J. Rodriguez
Edgar J. Rodriguez

Reputation: 395

Move AWS EC2 Instance to another account

I created a Amazon AWS EC2 instance under my account and made an website/ftp on it, now a new partner wants to move the instance under his company account so his company can pay the bills.

We can't change the instance IP because banks in the region are communicating with the server.

How can I move the instance to a different account without having to change anything on the configuration?

Upvotes: 18

Views: 43289

Answers (6)

Jason S
Jason S

Reputation: 1544

You can re-think the design of having the banks in the region communicating to your servers via IP.
If the banks communicate using DNS names, you have much more flexibility to move your servers around.
You can also achieve improvements in high availability and resiliency by moving to DNS connections.

So a plan might be

  • Setup a DNS record for your existing server
  • Get the banks who connect to your server to connect via the DNS name
  • Setup your new server in the other account (other answers describe this)
  • Cut the banks over to your new server in the new account simply by updating the DNS record

I haven't tried load balancing across accounts, but that may be another option, which would give you HA as a bonus. By registering your current instance, and new instance in another account as targets with a load balancer and getting your clients to connect to the load balancer, you could cut over to the other account. The only part I haven't tried is registering targets in different accounts, but looks like this should be possible with an AWS Network Load Balancer

Upvotes: 0

Andre Leon Rangel
Andre Leon Rangel

Reputation: 1799

there are more than 10 steps involved in doing the cloud move. I would suggest you use Infrastructure as a Configuration (terraform and CloudFormation) or Infrastructure as a real code (pulumi and CDK)

however if you want to give a go at a nice tool I found called KopiCloud. Please feel welcome to try it and leave your comments below. Is good if you need to move instances on a quick lift and shift scenario.

Upvotes: 0

karel
karel

Reputation: 5850

To share or migrate EC2 instances from a source account to a target account follow these steps:

  1. Create a custom Amazon Machine Image (AMI) from the instance you want to share or migrate. Be sure to include all required EBS data volumes in the AMI.

    Note: Data stored on instance store volumes isn't preserved in AMIs, and won't be on the instance store volumes of the instances that you launch from the AMI.

  2. Share the AMI with the target account using either the EC2 console or the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI).

  3. From the target account, find the AMI using the EC2 console or the AWS CLI.

  4. Launch a new instance from the shared AMI on the target account.

    Note: The private IP address of VPC instances will be different in the new account, unless you specifically set them during launch.

Related information

Source: Transfer Amazon EC2 Instance

Upvotes: 7

Guillermo Musumeci
Guillermo Musumeci

Reputation: 27

I'm working with several hundreds on EC2 instances in several AWS regions and accounts. You can move an EC2 instance to another AWS account, however, you can't move the Elastic IP and it will take up 16 steps with AWS CLI, if you want to migrate Tags and clone the Security Groups. I wrote a detailed post with the whole process at https://medium.com/@gmusumeci/how-to-move-an-ec2-instance-to-another-aws-account-e5a8f04cef21.

Upvotes: 0

SuperNova
SuperNova

Reputation: 27436

This is not possible.

AWS Support does not have access to copy Amazon EC2 resources or manipulate any configuration options in AWS accounts. You can't separate an AWS account from an Amazon.com account or transfer resources between AWS accounts. It is possible to manually migrate Amazon EC2 resources from one account to another by completing the steps described here.

Source : https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/account-transfer-ec2-instance/

Upvotes: 3

slayedbylucifer
slayedbylucifer

Reputation: 23492

The short answer is: No, you cannot move an running instance from one account to another unless and ofcourse AWS Technical support has some magic available behind the curtains.

You can However, Create an AMI from this instance and share this AMI with other users/account. refer: http://aws.amazon.com/articles/530

Upvotes: 21

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