How-To: Transfer AWS Elemental Link between AWS Regions (part 2)

This post is part of a series

AWS Elemental Link features for building flexible and cost-efficient live streaming platforms
Part 1 How-To: Transfer an AWS Elemental Link between AWS Accounts
Part 2 How-To: Transfer AWS Elemental Link between AWS Regions (this post)
Part 3 How-To: Create multiple MediaLive inputs using the same AWS Elemental Link

Introduction

AWS Elemental Link can be transferred between AWS accounts and AWS Regions, expanding its use for content producers that travel the globe. Link’s regional portability improves the reliability and latency of content contribution to AWS Elemental MediaLive by enabling customers to build the channel in an AWS Region closest to the content origination. As an example, a video production team may be covering live events in different geographic regions of the world and would create MediaLive workloads in nearest supported AWS Region for each event. This post provides detailed procedure to change Link’s AWS Region as needed.

Requirements

1. AWS Management Console: Log in credentials to AWS Management console.

2. Link: Access to a Link attached to the AWS account.

3. AWS Identity & Access Management (AWS IAM) permissions: An IAM user with list, describe, create permissions to view and manage device transfers.

AWS IAM permissions

To view and manage Link devices and device Region transfer operations, the IAM user must have certain minimum permissions. Users that operate MediaLive-based workloads require additional permissions. The following policy statements only show minimum permissions needed to perform the actions in this post. You can refer to the instructions in the links to create an IAM user and assign specific permissions.

Current device owner account

The following policy statement shows the minimum permissions necessary to view and transfer the Region of an existing Link.

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Sid": "VisualEditor0",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "medialive:DescribeInputDeviceThumbnail",
                "medialive:TransferInputDevice",
                "medialive:DescribeInputDevice"
            ],
            "Resource": "arn:aws:medialive:*:521561592338:inputDevice:*"
        },
        {
            "Sid": "VisualEditor1",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": "medialive:ListInputDevices",
            "Resource": "*"
        }
    ]
}

Step 1: Initiate device Region transfer

In the following instructions, you learn how to complete a device transfer between two Regions using the AWS Management Console. You need the

Image depicting transfer of Link from one AWS Region to another

Transfer of AWS Elemental Link from AWS Region A to B

2. Navigate to the Devices and select the Link that you want to transfer, this takes you to the Link’s overview page.

Figure: MediaLive Management Console, Devices page

3. Click the Transfer device button to begin transfer process.

4. In the pop-up window, select the radio button for Transfer to another AWS Region. Select the new AWS Region from the drop-down list.

Figure: Transfer device window

5. Click the Transfer button to complete the device transfer.

If the transfer initiation is successful, a success message is displayed and the Link is no longer visible in the console.

Figure: Transfer device success notification

If you get the following error, you must follow Steps 1 and 2 of this section to remove any association of this Link with MediaLive inputs.

Figure: Transfer device failure notification

Step 2: Validate Region transfer

1. In the AWS Management Console, locate the Region selection drop-down in top-right area of the page. From the drop-down, select the new AWS Region of the Link.

Figure: AWS Management Console, Region selection drop-down

2. If you haven’t navigated away from the AWS Management Console after initiating the transfer, the console reloads the device page in the new AWS Region. You can also navigate back to Devices section of MediaLive console to view the transferred Link.

3. Validate the Connection State is Connected. This completes the Link Region transfer.

In this post, you learned how to use the device transfer feature of Link to re-assign it to a different AWS Region. You can now contribute your live streams to the AWS Region closest to the origin of the content. To continue building your streaming workload, please refer to the following detailed blog posts:

If you have questions, feedback, or would like to get involved in discussions with other community members, visit the AWS Developer Forums: Media Services.

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