Move AWS EC2 Instance to another account

Question

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

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

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/

Answer 5

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

• Changing the Encryption State of Your Data

• AWS CLI Command Reference (EC2)

_{Source: Transfer Amazon EC2 Instance}