Siu Lun

Singapore AWS has been out the past couple of weeks, and I’ve migrated my server over. I have to say, accessing from Hong Kong is much faster.

If you also want to migrate your own server from US to Singapore or just want to use one of the pre-built AMI avaliable in the US but not yet in Singapore, follow what I’ve done.

First of all, start an instance of your AMI.

If the AMI you started is not your own, then customise it first, then execute within the instance:
ec2-bundle-vol -k private_key -u user_id -c cert

Once completed, upload the image direct to an S3 bucket in Singapore!
ec2-upload-bundle -b my-sg-bucket -m manifest -a access_key_id -s secret_key --location ap-southeast-1

Then all you have to do is register it. (commandline below)

If you have already got your own AMI, then SSH in a new instance of your own image, execute:
ec2-migrate-bundle -k private_key -c cert -a access_key_id -s secret_key --bucket my-us-bucket --destination-bucket my-sg-bucket --manifest manifest_path --location ap-southeast-1 --ec2cert ec2_cert_path --region ap-southeast-1

Your AMI will be uploaded to the Singapore S3 service, then you can use:
ec2-register --region ap-southeast-1 --name myvm my-sg-bucket/image.manifest.xml

Then you can launch your own SG instance! You may want to migrate any EBS volumes and data over. I didn’t have to deal with the hassle of that as there is no easy way to do it. I just backed up all files on my server onto my own machine and re-uploaded after.

So a few days ago I experienced my first server outage with Amazon EC2.

How long? Unknown (perhaps roughly an hour or two)
Reason? While I was trying to figure out the reason, by pinging the server, nothing responded, it almost seems as the node simply disconnected from the net.

Fix? Well I did fire up another instance to replace it, but in the end, a simple restart instance fixed the issue.

Why could that be? I dunno, but the instance has been up and stable for a period of 6 months.