Posted On: Apr 6, 2021

You can now quickly and conveniently copy Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) across Amazon Web Services China Regions (both Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD) and other Amazon Web Services regions (also known as partitions) to ensure that your AMIs are available and consistent among all Amazon Web Services regions.

Previously, to copy AMIs across these Amazon Web Services 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 Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and restored from S3. You can utilize this new capability to copy AMIs across partitions. To do so, you can store your Amazon EBS-backed AMIs in S3 buckets in your source partition. Once you have the AMI stored in S3, you can utilize your existing processes to move your AMI to an S3 bucket in the destination partition. Finally, you can restore the AMI from S3 bucket into the destination partition. Please note that this feature does not provide any data transfer capability across partitions – you should utilize your own existing process, and you may be subject to applicable laws and regulations on data transfer.

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