Nitesh shows you how to
move an AMI from one AWS region
to another


I want to launch a copy of my Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (Amazon EC2) instance to serve clients in other geographical regions, and to create redundancy in my application. How do I create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) of my Amazon EC2 instance and then copy the AMI to another AWS Region?

To create a copy of your AMI in another AWS Region, follow these steps:

  1. Create an AMI of your EC2 instance:
    To create a Linux AMI, see Creating Your Own AMI
    To create a Windows AMI, see Creating a Custom Windows AMI.
  2. Copy the AMI of your EC2 instance to another AWS Region:
    To copy a Linux AMI, see Copying an AMI.
    To copy a Windows AMI, see Copying an AMI.

After the copy operation completes, launch a new EC2 instance from your AMI in the new AWS Region.

Note: If you get the error message "This AMI was copied from an AMI with a kernel that is unavailable in the destination region: {Image ID}," it's because Linux paravirtual (PV) AMIs are not supported in all AWS Regions. Migrate your instance to a hardware virtual machine (HVM) environment instead.

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Published: 2016-09-02

Updated: 2018-05-21