
Hurricane Sandy and AWS: Migrating Octopart Out of us-east-1 in a Hurry - sam
http://octopart.com/blog/archives/2012/11/hurricane-sandy-and-amazon-web-services%253A-migrating-out-of-us%252Deast%252D1-in-a-hurry
======
ChuckMcM
Ok, if you're looking for a startup idea, here you go a free one on the house
:-)

"EjectorSeat" - EjectorSeat is the hip cool way to create a current, usable,
set of scripts which can move any AWS/EC2/Linode/Heroku/... (start with
AWS/EC2) instance from where it is, to somewhere else. By using EjectorSeat
all of the changes and specs you have on your install are automatically
documented into its configuration and data location databases so that when the
time comes to pull the yellow and black handles, you will know that your
install is being migrated, and better yet, when its done migrating one push of
a button and blam! its up and running.

\-----------

It seems like this should be possible to package up (it will take a bit of
work of course) but its the 'copper' option (of the silver/bronze/gold
nomenclature) for disaster preparedness. Basically you don't have the funds to
maintain two instances all the time, this lets you move the one you have when
you need to.

Of course like real ejector seats it will have failure conditions (like flying
inverted at 50', bad time to eject) but it could provide an ops guy with a bit
of piece of mind.

~~~
lr
Most of the hard work is already done for this: Puppet, Chef, etc.

~~~
jeffbarr
CloudFormation should also be helpful here.

~~~
nmcfarl
Yeah - but what would really help is if EC2 had more tools to support cross
region moves†.

Hint, hint…

\--

† I too did an us-east-1 to us-west-2 move on Monday, and it was unfun.

~~~
jimwalsh
They provide pretty good tools already. If you leverage their API and S3 you
can migrate AMI's and EBS's across regions quite effectively. Could the tools
get better, yes. But it's not as hard as it is often made out to be.

~~~
nmcfarl
I just did this Monday, and there is 0 support that I could find for moving
ebs volumes cross region. I used netcat to push the data, which seems
profoundly wasteful.

I'd love to hear of an s3 based approach.

~~~
jimwalsh
You can use this, many people have reported it does well. I have not used it.

<https://cloudyscripts.com/tool/show/5>

You can also use the APIs to do that S3 copy I mentioned. Here are one of the
many write ups of that technique.

<http://alestic.com/2010/10/ec2-ami-copy>

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sehugg
RDS/EBS snapshots being bound to their region is a big stumbling block.
Especially for RDS, because the only solution is mysqldump (or similar) and
that not only blocks the production database but takes hours for databases
above 10 GB. So at the end of this you have a very out-of-date backup that you
can transfer to the other region.

Cross-region snapshot mirroring would be a great enhancement feature for AWS.

~~~
blantonl
You might just consider setting up a dedicated slave MySQL database on a
smaller instance in the west region just for the eventuality that you need to
spin up a master there. Then you can just snapshot, copy to ephemeral, and go
from there.

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davidjgraph
"EBS snapshots cannot be moved between regions"

Not true. I've done this using Ylastic. See
<http://ylastic.com/features.html>:

"Migrate EBS linux snapshots between regions."

"Migrate EBS windows snapshots between regions."

Takes a few minutes to kick off and does it all for you.

~~~
nmcfarl
As you’ve used it - how long does it take? I read up, and I decided they where
probably just making a new EBS volume in the new region, `netcat`ing the data
across, and taking a snapshot of that new volume, with the `netcat`ed data.

So I did it by hand - that way. It it’d be pretty easy to tell if this was the
case, because it really wouldn’t be fast….

~~~
davidjgraph
It's not fast, they send you an email when it's done. It was a while ago now,
but I recall it taking about 30 minutes before I got the email.

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hubmo
I know this is a little late for your case but you can migrate snapshots from
1 region to another. We spend sunday moving from US-East 1 to US-West 1 and
took 2 hours to setup our entire infrastructure consisting of 20 servers &
about 180 GB database

There are several options

1\. Manually - <http://alestic.com/2010/10/ec2-ami-copy>

2\. Automatically via Scripts a) migrate-ebs-image.pl -
<http://search.cpan.org/~lds/VM-EC2/bin/migrate-ebs-image.pl> b) CloudyScript
Migrate SnapShot - <https://cloudyscripts.com/tool/show/4> c) CloudyScript
Migrate AMI - <https://cloudyscripts.com/tool/show/5>

3\. Commercial Services a) <http://ylastic.com/> b) RightScale

* ylastic is really cheap at $25 / month * I used the perl script migrate-ebs-image.pl, super simple to install and use. * CloudyScripts has open sourced their Ruby gem so you can build on top of it. They also have a free web form you can just use (but may not be secure enough). But you can launch their AMI in your own instance which should be secure

Hope that helps for next time!

~~~
sam
Thanks, these will be useful for next time. Hopefully AWS will add the
capability to migrate the EBS snapshots to the console soon.

~~~
hubmo
would be nice for sure. luckily AWS builds the API first then builds it into
the console, so many you can still get the job done just takes a little
digging. feel free to reach out if you ever run into another situation like
this

