At the end of 2017, the AWS Ningxia region officially opened for operation. Some instance prices in the AWS Ningxia region are nearly 40% lower than the AWS Beijing region. For cost reasons, many customers want to migrate their business to the AWS Ningxia region.

Migration scope includes:

• EC2
• EBS
• S3
• RDS
• ElastiCache
• DynamoDB

1. Migrate EC2 from BJS to ZHY

a) Create AMI from Instance

In the EC2 console, click Instances in the left selection bar, right-click on the instance to be migrated and select Image -> Create Image.

You can create an AMI using the AWS Management Console or command line.

The diagram below summarizes the process of creating an Amazon EBS-backed AMI from a running EC2 instance. Starting from an existing AMI, launch an instance, customize the instance, create a new AMI from that instance, and finally launch an instance of the new AMI.

Workflow for creating AMI from instance

Specific operation steps:

b) Copy AMI

You can copy Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) within or across AWS regions using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface or SDKs, or the Amazon EC2 API. You can copy AMIs backed by Amazon EBS and AMIs backed by instance store. You can copy AMIs with encrypted snapshots and change the encryption status during the copy process.

Copying the source AMI generates an identical but independent target AMI (with its own unique identifier). For Amazon EBS-backed AMIs, each backing snapshot is copied to an identical but independent target snapshot by default. You can change or deregister the source AMI without any impact on the target AMI. The reverse is also true.

There is no charge for copying AMIs. However, standard storage and data transfer fees apply.

AWS does not copy launch permissions, user-defined tags, or Amazon S3 bucket permissions from the source AMI to the new AMI. After the copy operation completes, you can apply launch permissions, user-defined tags, and Amazon S3 bucket permissions to the new AMI.

Permissions for Copying Instance Store-Backed AMIs

If you use an IAM user to copy an instance store-backed AMI, the user must have the following Amazon S3 permissions: s3:CreateBucket, s3:GetBucketAcl, s3:ListAllMyBuckets, s3:GetObject, s3:PutObject, and s3:PutObjectAcl.

Specific operation steps:

c) Launch Instance in ZHY

Launch an instance from the AMI, enter the launch instance wizard, and successfully launch in ZHY

2. Migrate EBS from BJS to ZHY

a) Create Snapshot

b) Cross-region Copy Snapshot

c) Create Volume in ZHY

3. Migrate S3 from BJS to ZHY

To migrate S3 from BJS to ZHY, you have the following two migration options:

1. Create a new S3 bucket in the Ningxia region and copy the data to that bucket.
2. Delete the original data bucket and recreate an S3 bucket with the same name in the Ningxia region (target region). This option requires a temporary bucket as a transfer intermediate.

a) Create New S3 Bucket

In the S3 console, click Create Bucket, select Ningxia as the bucket's availability zone. In the Copy settings from an existing bucket option, select the S3 bucket you want to migrate.

Run the following command in CLI to start copying files in the bucket.

aws s3 sync s3://SOURCE_BUCKET_NAME s3://NEW_BUCKET_NAME

Create a temporary bucket, see step (1).

Run the following commands in CLI to store the contents of the old S3 bucket into the temporary bucket.

aws s3 sync s3://foobucket s3://tmpbucket

Delete the old S3 bucket in the console, wait 24 hours for the name to become effective again.

Re-register an S3 bucket with the same name in the Ningxia region.

Run the following commands in CLI to store files from the temporary bucket into the target bucket.

aws s3 sync s3://tmpbucket s3://foobucket

4. Migrate RDS for MySQL from BJS to ZHY

There are two options for migrating RDS to ZHY:

• Create snapshot and deploy to other region
• Use DMS service

Option 1: Create Snapshot and Deploy to Other Region

Specific operation steps:

1. Log in to the AWS Management Console and open the Amazon RDS console.

2. In the navigation pane, select Databases.

3. In the database instance list, select the database instance you want to take a snapshot of.

4. For Actions, select Take Snapshot.

5. In the Snapshot Name box, type a name for the snapshot.

In the left navigation bar, select Snapshot, select the snapshot just created, Actions select Copy Snapshot to copy the RDS snapshot, and set the Ningxia region as the target region for snapshot copy.

Next, you can restore the RDS service in the Ningxia region from the snapshot

Option 2: Use DMS Service

Using DMS, you can complete 7x24 online database migration with minimal downtime. The general process is as follows:

• Create replication instance

• Create target and source endpoints

• Create migration task for database

• Confirm migration

You can view task statistics and monitoring information by selecting the running task from the AWS Management Console to confirm migration completion.

5. Migrate ElastiCache for Redis from BJS to ZHY

Migrating ElastiCache service is divided into two steps: backup ElastiCache to BJS's S3, copy to ZHY's S3, then perform backup recovery.

Step 1: Backup Redis Service to S3

Stop write operations before creating a backup.

In the console, select the Redis service you want to migrate, click the Backup button above to create a backup.

In the console left selection bar, click the Backups option to view the backup just created.

• Create an S3 bucket to store ElastiCache backups.
• Select Permissions -> Access Control List in sequence.
• Under Access for other AWS accounts, select + Add account.
• Add the canonical id of the corresponding region in the window
• Check Yes for the following options: List objects Write objects Read bucket permissions
• Select Save to authorize ElastiCache to read and write files in the S3 bucket

Step 2: Deploy Backup to Ningxia Region

• Migrate the backup file from the S3 bucket in Beijing region to Ningxia region, or download and upload to Ningxia's S3.
• Create a new Redis service in Ningxia region
• Enter the backup file path in the Ningxia S3 bucket in the Import data to cluster item

6. Migrate DynamoDB Service from BJS to ZHY

Option 1: Use Custom API

You can use API to transfer data from BJS to ZHY, configure script parameters as needed

Execute the following code in terminal:

python transferDynamoDB.py -t [source table] -r [source region] -nr [destination region]

Option 2: Use EMR Hive to Migrate Data to Ningxia Region

Use Amazon EMR to create a cluster, use EMR Hive to migrate BJS data to ZHY.

Specific operation steps:

Launch Amazon EMR cluster and connect to the cluster using SSH

Log into Hive

In Hive, create 2 External tables with locations pointing to BJS and ZHY respectively.

Use query to copy BJS data to ZHY, you can use insert into to avoid overwriting original data.

After database migration is complete, please update server configuration in a timely manner.