Move EC2 Instance to another AZ or Subnet

To reap the benefits of High Availability in EC2, it's advisable to deploy the instances in different AZ or Subnets. But what in case you already deployed the instance in the same AZ and then wanted a few of them to move to a different AZ.

AWS doesn't give you a direct way of moving the EC2 instances across AZs, but there are a series of steps that you need to follow to move or clone the EC2 instance to another AZ. 

Performing those steps takes a lot of time as these include copying the security groups, tags, creating AMI of the source EC2 instance, and then deploying the new EC2 in the different AZ using the AMI created and a lot more.

MagicPowershell comes up with a PowerShell script that moves the EC2 instance to the AZ you want. It asks for 3 inputs, instance name, region, and the AZ in which you want to move the instance, and performs the tedious-looking tasks for you.

	$servername = Read-Host "Please provide the EC2 instance name"
	$region= Read-Host "Please provide the region in which server needs to be deployed(eg. us-east-1)"
	$AZ = Read-Host "Please provide the AZ in which you want to move the instance(eg. us-east-1a)"
	Set-AWSCredentials -AccessKey $env:AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID -SecretKey $env:AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY -SessionToken $env:AWS_SESSION_TOKEN -StoreAs Build
	Initialize-AWSDefaultConfiguration -ProfileName Build -Region $region
	$instanceid = (Get-EC2Instance | ?{$_.Instances.tag.value -like $ServerName}).Instances | Select -ExpandProperty InstanceId
	$securitygroup = (Get-EC2Instance | ?{$_.Instances.tag.value -like $ServerName}).Instances.SecurityGroups.GroupId
	$instancetype = (Get-EC2Instance | ?{$_.Instances.tag.value -like $ServerName}).Instances.InstanceType
	$tags1 = Get-EC2Tag -Filter @{Name="resource-type";Values="instance"},@{Name="resource-id";Values= $InstanceId} | Select Key,Value
	Stop-EC2Instance -InstanceId $instanceid
	Start-Sleep -Seconds 120
	$ami = New-EC2Image -InstanceId $instanceid -Name $InstanceName -Description "Test"
	$subnetid = Get-EC2Subnet | ?{$_.AvailabilityZone -eq $AZ } | Select -ExpandProperty SubnetId | Select -First 1
	$KeyPair = New-EC2KeyPair -KeyName "Restore-key"
	$KeyPair.KeyMaterial | Out-File -Encoding ascii "$env:USERPROFILE\Desktop\Restore-key.pem"
	$newid = (New-EC2Instance -ImageId $ami -MinCount 1 -MaxCount 1 -SubnetId $subnetid -SecurityGroupId $securitygroup -DisableApiTermination $true -Monitoring $true -InstanceType $instancetype -KeyName "Restore-key").Instances.InstanceId
	foreach($tags in $tags1)
	{
	New-EC2Tag -Resource $newid -Tag $tags
	}
	$IP = (Get-EC2Instance | ?{$_.Instances.InstanceId -eq $newid}).Instances | Select -ExpandProperty PrivateIpAddress
	$password = Get-EC2PasswordData -InstanceId $newid -PemFile "$env:USERPROFILE\Desktop\Restore-key.pem"
	$username = "Administrator"
	$pass = $password | ConvertTo-SecureString -AsPlainText -Force
	$cred = New-Object System.Management.Automation.PsCredential($username,$pass)
	Add-Computer -ComputerName $IP -DomainName "yourdomain.com" -NewName $servername -LocalCredential $cred -Restart -Force

view raw MoveAcrossAZ.ps1 hosted with ❤ by GitHub