Announcing AMI Copy for Amazon EC2

[DanielBMarkham]

http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2013/03/12/announcing-ami-copy-for-amazon-ec2/

[UnoriginalGuy]

Kind of funny, just yesterday someone was having a moan about the difficulty of transferring ANI images from one region to another (and the work-around they have deployed, using the Amazon API and a EC2 instance).

Guess this is good news for them. I'm surprised it took this long for something as core as AMIs across different availability zones to happen. I guess there wasn't a lot of money in it.

[dkl → UnoriginalGuy]

It is absolutely ridiculous that it took them this long to do this. It should have been available on the first day there were different regions.

[justinsb → dkl]

The AWS strategy is to release the bare minimum and then announce little fixes as if they were new products. It's gotten to the point where they release a product in one region, and then later announce availability in other regions with almost as much fanfare.

It detracts from the interesting work AWS is actually doing, I think, when they crowd it out with this stuff. But we should do our bit by not upvoting their sillier announcements...

[benjaminwootton]

Has anyone hear worked for Amazon on AWS?

They work on some really interesting stuff over there and seem to deliver at quite a rate.

Would be interested in hearing more about what it is like.

[miles932 → benjaminwootton]

It's very, very fun :)

[offbyone → miles932]

And we're hiring!

[deepGem → offbyone]

Any specific JD on the careers site ?

[revertts → deepGem]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5304977 ;)

[pzb → benjaminwootton]

It is a blast! Come join us and help increase the rate we deliver :)

[deepGem]

What I really want is an AMI copy from EC2 to <xyz> provider and vise versa :).

[thecodemonkey]

This is huge for people who runs multi-region servers. I needed this last summer but had to use an alternative solution.

[adrr → thecodemonkey]

Very useful feature. Could always do it with scripts(like cloudyscripts) but it seemed janky rsyncing files over.

[skram]

Finally!

[contingencies]

Here's a scripted solution to do apparently the same thing that I ran across earlier this week: https://bitbucket.org/edowd/gentoo_bootstrap/src/045c4dbdb9c...

[nmcfarl → contingencies]

It looks like that sucker only runs if you have snapshots of the root disk to copy across regions.

The script we use in house uses netcat and a pair of running EC2 instances, one in each region.

All of the solutions I've seen, before this announcement, have had some serious limitations - so I'm rather happy to see this.