How to Move an EC2 Instance to a Different Region (us-east-1 → ap-northeast-2)
There is no "move" button for EC2 instances across AWS regions — regions are fully isolated fault domains, and AWS intentionally provides no direct instance migration API. The correct path is to capture your instance as an AMI, copy that AMI to the target region, and launch a new instance from it. This post walks you through every step, including the gotchas that trip up engineers the first time. TL;DR Step Action Key Detail 1 Create AMI from source instance Optionally stop instance first for filesystem consistency 2 Copy AMI to target region aws ec2 copy-image --source-region us-east-1 --destination-region ap-northeast-2 3 Prepare target region prerequisites VPC, subnet, SG, key pair, instance profile 4 Launch new instance from copied AMI Use aws ec2 run-instances in ap-northeast-2 5 Validate & decommission source Verify app health, then terminate old instance and deregister old AMI ...