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snapshotamazon-ebs

How to seed the root device of an EBS backed EC2 instance from snapshot?

As I understood, for an EBS backed EC2 instance, it's root device will be an EBS volume. Now if I want to have the content of the EBS volume to be a snapshot that I took earlier (for the root device of another EBS backed EC2 instance), how can I do that?

Solution

  • The short version is that you find the snapshot in the AWS management console, click the Launch button, and follow the steps in the wizard (to e.g. select availability zone).

    There is a detailed walk through here:

    http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/datacenter/how-to-create-a-new-ami-from-a-snapshot-and-launch-a-new-vm/5349

    This can also be done a number of other ways, including

    • From the command line / a script
    • Programmatically through the API
    • Automatically e.g. using Auto Scaling