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Wed, 11 Nov 2009

/Hosting/Amazon/EC2: Transferring an Amazon EC2 Image to Another Account

This[1] would be the document of record from Amazon....

First, configure ElasticFox so that there is one window connected to each of the two accounts (sending and receiving). Also, setup two terminals, each one configured with the necessary environment variables to use the standard EC2 command line tools[2] for one of the accounts.

Second, a logistical observation.... As I am not the owner of the Amazon accounts I am using, but rather a consultant using and operating the accounts on behalf of the owners, I do not have access to the "AWS Management Console". I "only" (this is actually quite a lot) have the privileges conferred by possessing the account keys. Using these privileges I can transfer a server AMI, but there appears to be no way to transfer an EBS store between accounts. So the first step is to login to the sending account, mount any EBS stores that are desired, copy there contents into the volatile area of the server, and create a new AMI that will contain both the server and the data.

One can get the list of AMIs belonging to the sending account thusly:

ec2-describe-images -o self

Now (briefly) make the just-created AMI containing the data public. (One can make the AMI visible only to one account, but I am under time pressure and I do not at the moment know the AWS account number of the receiving account):

ec2-modify-image-attribute ami-1573907c -launch-permission --add all

Now in the receiving account start the AMI (point and click with ElasticFox), then back at the command line open SSH in the firewall (necessary if this is a new account):

ec2-authorize default -p 22

In a terminal login to your running server in the receiving account, using the keypair you used in ElasticFox when the server was started, and the "public DNS" for the server being reported by ElasticFox:

ssh -i ~/ec2/id-keypair root@ec2-xx-xx-xx-xxx.compute-1.amazonaws.com

Go back to the sending account and reset the transferred AMI to the private state:

ec2-reset-image-attribute ami-1573907c -l

Double-check the permissions on an AMI with:

ec2-describe-image-attribute ami-1573907c -l

(It would appear to return nothing when there are no non-private permissions set....)

Back to the receiving account to: use ElasticFox to create a new EBS store, format it, then move the data from the server's volatile storage into the EBS. Also create and associate an ElasticIP to the new server. (This means that the server's "public DNS" will change, and the terminal login must be redone.) Open the http port (80).

On the new server, edit the Apache configuration. Delete unneeded MySQL databases. Start Apache and MySQL. Test.

Change the keys in the EBS snapshot script and test.

Change the keys in the server snapshot script and make a bundle of this just-started AMI for the new account.

[1] http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?entryID=530
[2] http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?externalID=351&categoryID=88

posted at: 13:05 | path: /Hosting/Amazon/EC2 | permanent link to this entry

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Wed, 11 Nov 2009