Is it possible to change the availability zone of an existing EC2 t1.micro instance?

Question

Sometimes when trying to launch my t1.micro EC2 instance, it cannot be provisioned and Amazon recommends trying a different availability zone. Is it possible to change this for an existing instance?

Answer 1

Directly shifting an existing EC2 to another availability zone is not possible. Instead, you can create an AMI for that instance and create in another AZ.

1. First, Stop the instance which you want to shift to a new AZ
2. Create an AMI of that EC2 instance
3. Now, launch a new instance in the preferred AZ with your saved AMI. This created instance will have all the data of your stopped instance.
4. Terminate the old instance if this is working fine.