You thought you were very clever and setup one AWS account to manage all the web activities. Then as your company scales you realize that maybe some of those instances need to be separated because they are part of (new) business units.

Since I wasn’t able to find a way to itemize bill instances or other services into groups, the only way to make it the cleanest was to create completely new accounts. I’ve outlined the steps below for those that might be facing this same challenge. When it comes to billing you can consolidate bills together from separate AWS accounts which makes it cleaner for your CFO. You have to create the separate accounts in order to do it which brings us back to doe.

Take notes and walk through these steps in order. Patience will get you through. If you have to move 10 or more then I suggest you put on your headphones and listen to all those podcasts your friends have been telling you about.

Steps

  1. Create your new AWS account and take note of the account ID
  2. In the old account, create an AMI of each instance
  3. In the old account, change permission of the AMI, adding the new account ID
  4. We are going to be in the new account for the next few steps
  5. Go to AMI and then view your private images. You will see the image from your old account.
  6. Launch that as a new instance
  7. You will have to create new IAM rules, PEM and security groups at this point
  8. The instance is created and you now have a new IP
  9. Change your DNS settings accordingly. If you’re using Route 53 for your DNS management then you might also want to consider moving that over to your new account too.
  10. Wait for the TTL and check your domain names, services, etc. to learn if everything is resolving to the right place
  11. Go back to your old account
  12. Deregister the AMI if you want but having it there could be pulse-lowering if you need to recreate it agin. You are being billed the S3 costs for it’s existent so usually that means pennies.
  13. Terminate the old instance once you have confirmed that everything is up and running.
  14. You have not successfully moved the instance from the old AWS account to the new AWS account.
  15. Enjoy the rare moment when you get to tell your CFO that you have made his or her life easier.

Also, I’ve been digging into the IAM policy rule system and it’s mighty powerful. Educate yourself on that sometime.

Nerd on.

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