I have several Amazon AWS EC2 virtual machines that I created on AWS EC2. They were not imported, they were created there. I would like to export these machines in order to achieve local backups, and a local testing environment.
I have looked a lot of places, and found tons of information that says you can only export a VM from EC2 if you imported into EC2 originally. I have also found information that says you can only import into EC2 if the machine was originally exported from EC2.
My question is, is it possible to export a VM that was built on EC2, and somehow get it locally. I have read that you have to back it up to an S3 Bucket, and then download it, but Amazon's documentation says that you can only export it from there if it was originally imported.
Here are the links on serverfault that I found this question asked, but not answered.
Best Answer
if you could export an aws instance / image to openstack, for instance, bezos would be losing money..... the whole concept of the cloud is that instances are ephemeral and conf mgmt (puppet, salt, etc) is what makes them do what they do. data volumes are a different however, and that is obviously possible.
to actually boot an aws instance on your local hardware would be difficult. try snapshoting instance root drive, then mounting snapshot'd volume onto a newly lauched image, and then dd it to file and rsync to your local machine. then the fun begins.... you might be able to have it boot locally but probably impossible... never tried that as its not really fruitful