Posted On: Apr 6, 2021

You can now quickly and conveniently copy Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) to AWS GovCloud (US) Regions, AWS China Regions and other AWS regions (also known as partitions) to ensure that your AMIs are available and consistent globally.

Previously, to copy AMIs across these AWS regions, you had to rebuild the AMI in each of them. These partitions enabled data isolation but often made this copy process complex, time-consuming and expensive. With this feature, you no longer need to maintain complex processes to duplicate AMIs across partitions.

This feature provides a packaged format that allows AMIs of size 1TB or less to be stored in AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) and later moved to any other region. You can utilize this new capability to copy AMIs across AWS GovCloud (US) Regions, AWS China Regions and other AWS regions. To do so, you can store your Amazon EBS-backed AMIs into S3 buckets in your source partition, transfer to S3 in the destination partition and then restore that AMI from S3 in the destination partition.

This functionality is available through the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) and the AWS Software Development Kit (AWS SDK). To learn more about copying AMIs across these partitions, please refer to the documentation.