Is it possible to change the zone of a running EC2 instance?

Question

Is it possible to change the zone of a running EC2 instance?

I currently get "insufficient capacity" error when I try to start an ebs backed micro instance that was running 30 mins ago.

I'm trying to use "> ec2-modify-instance-attribute instance_id --SOME_OPTION-TO-CHANGE-ZONE"

but I'm making no progress.

Related to : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8425739/is-it-possible-to-change-the-availability-zone-of-an-existing-ec2-t1-micro-insta

Posted 20mins ago - any chance AWS is taking down a chunk of servers? (They sent me a hardware failure immanent email)

Thanks for any help - I'm fairly new at EC2.

Answer 1

No, but you can create an AMI from it, which'll let you launch an exact copy of that instance in any availability zone within that region. Launch the copy and kill the original.

We got an instance-reboot e-mail today because AWS wants the instances to pick up new patches, presumably to the AWS tools. I've heard rumours of better EBS performance as a result.