Migrating a running EC2 machine from one AWS account to another seems a complicated task. But by utilizing the available resources and with careful planning, you can easily achieve this. There are several ways to migrate an EC2 machine across AWS accounts but we are going to explore the easiest one.
We'll use Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to create an Image from EC2 instance and use that image in the target AWS account to create a new EC2 Instance.
Requirements
To test or perform this migration, you need two separate AWS accounts. One AWS account will act as source and another AWS account will act as target.
- Source AWS account where EC2 is running.
- Target AWS account where EC2 needs to migrated.
As keeping this migration process simple and easy, there are not many requirements. In the next section, we'll start with creating the AMI of our running EC2 instance.
Creating AMI of EC2 instance (Source account)
An EC2 instance, with Nginx web server, is running on my source AWS account. A single-page website is hosted on this EC2 instance just so we can confirm that everything is migrated as expected.
The Above webpage is being served by Nginx web server that is running on EC2 instance in the source AWS account. Title of webpage is Test-Server and It's being accessed from 54.254.167.11 IP-Address.
To create AMI of this EC2 instance, follow the steps below:- Select EC2 instance > Actions > Image and templates > Create image
- Set the AMI name in Image name field. Also mark No reboot as Enable. Now keep everything unchanged and click on Create image.
