Transfer EC2 and Savings Plan from one AWS Account to another

1

Since I am new with AWS, I just come across Organizations in AWS, and just created new OUs and AWS Accounts.

Initially, I have an EC2 and a Savings plan under one account since I don't know Organizations then. Now that my main account is the Management Account, I want the EC2 instance and the Savings plan to be transferred to the new AWS Account under a specific OU. This is so that I can easily manage and determine the costs per OU.

Is this possible?

And if not, will this work:

  • Savings Plan will stay in the Management Account (I can't recreate this one since the plan is already for 3 years);
  • EC2 will be deleted on the Management Account;
  • Recreate a new EC2 on the new AWS Account;
  • with Consolidated Billing, the Savings Plan in the Management Account will take account for the EC2 on the new AWS Account

Let me know your thoughts on this.

4 Answers
2
Accepted Answer

Hello @GGsent,

Hope you are doing well.

I see that you would like to know how the Savings plans work in a consolidated billing environment.

Firstly, I would like to inform you that it is ideal that the Savings plans or Reserved instances contract to be purchased on the management account. This way, you can make sure that they do not go to waste if one of the member account that owns the SP or RI is shutdown or inaccessible for various reasons.

On the management account you can enable Reserved Instances and Savings Plan discount sharing [1] for the specific member accounts that you wish the discounts to be applied for. As per the steps provided by the above answers, you will be able to migrate the instance to another member account but also make sure that the SP continues to apply for its usage.

However, if you have member accounts that belong to different clients and would like to have different savings plans on different accounts, I recommend that you reach out to the Support team [2] and request them to transfer the SP to one of the member accounts. Please note that the team would only review the transfer of RIs or SPs within an Organisation. They do not support transfer between standalone accounts or from and Organisation to a standalone account.

--References --

Hope you found this information useful.

Regards,

Harshavardhan G

answered 2 years ago
  • +1 for pointing out that it is ideal to have a Savings Plan under the management account. Thank you.

  • Purchasing Savings Plans or Reserved Instances on the Management Payer account is NOT ALWAYS a good idea. We do say that the best practice is that customers should not run any workloads on the Management Payer account. But a lot of customers still do that. And because of this SPs are not used efficiently. It's better to create a dedicated account(s) within the Organization to be used solely for RI/SP management and purchases. This will ensure that SP discount will always apply to accounts and resources in Organization that provide you highest savings (if RI/SP sharing is enabled).

2

Thank you for using re:Post

You can indeed delete the ec2 from the management account and recreate it in your new account. You can also turning on shared reserved instances and Savings Plans discounts: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/ri-turn-on-process.html

Eric

AWS
Eric
answered 2 years ago
1

In order to simplify the migration of your EC2 instance, you can make a snapshot and share it with the new account.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-modifying-snapshot-permissions.html#share-unencrypted-snapshot

Savings Plans can be purchased in any account within an AWS Organization/Consolidated Billing family. By default, the benefit provided by Savings Plans is applicable to usage across all accounts within an AWS Organization/consolidated billing family.

https://aws.amazon.com/savingsplans/faq/

AWS
EXPERT
Hernito
answered 2 years ago
0

From the target account, find the AMI using the EC2 console or the AWS CLI. Launch a new instance from the shared AMI on the target account. To import a key pair from a previous account, see Import your own public key to Amazon EC2.

answered 2 years ago

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