Inventor's Paradox

Background My company uses SAP AG's Enterprise Resource Planning software. It as a complex system, but being developed by Germans has its advantages, for example the have many documentation in the form of SAP Notes and other stuff. One of the challenging task in using SAP's ERP is system migration and cloning. Two purposes for the migration : first, if you want to move the system to another hardware. The second, if we need a cloned system to do stuffs without compromising your original system. SAP's term for migration activity is 'System Copy' Where to start To find out steps needed to be done for system copy, you could read this slideshare-hosted SAP document here  (Best Practices : SAP System Landscape Copy). For another definitive starting point, check out SAP's wiki DOC-8324 System Copy and Migration . I noted that SAP has released Software Provisioning Manager from which we could do system copy, my previous system copy experiences has not involved...

In this post I would describe the process of moving an EC2 instance to another region. The background I have a server in one of the EC2 regions that a bit pricey than the rest. It seems that moving it to another region would save me some bucks. Well, it turns out that I did a few blunders that maybe causes the savings to be negligible. The initial plan I read that snapshots could be copied to other regions. So the original plan is to create snapshots of existing volumes that support the instance (I have one instance with three EBS volumes), copy these to another region, and create a new instance in the new region. The mistake My mistake is that I assume creating a new instance is a simple matter of selecting the platform (i386 or x86_64) and the root EBS volume. Actually, it is not. First, we create an AMI (Amazon Machine Image) using an EBS snapshot, not EBS volume. Then we could launch a new instance based on the AMI. As shown below, when we are trying to create a new AMI...