Ok, if you're looking for a startup idea, here you go a free one on the house :-)<p>"EjectorSeat" - EjectorSeat is the hip cool way to create a current, usable, set of scripts which can move any AWS/EC2/Linode/Heroku/... (start with AWS/EC2) instance from where it is, to somewhere else. By using EjectorSeat all of the changes and specs you have on your install are automatically documented into its configuration and data location databases so that when the time comes to pull the yellow and black handles, you will know that your install is being migrated, and better yet, when its done migrating one push of a button and blam! its up and running.<p>-----------<p>It seems like this should be possible to package up (it will take a bit of work of course) but its the 'copper' option (of the silver/bronze/gold nomenclature) for disaster preparedness. Basically you don't have the funds to maintain two instances all the time, this lets you move the one you have when you need to.<p>Of course like real ejector seats it will have failure conditions (like flying inverted at 50', bad time to eject) but it could provide an ops guy with a bit of piece of mind.
RDS/EBS snapshots being bound to their region is a big stumbling block. Especially for RDS, because the only solution is mysqldump (or similar) and that not only blocks the production database but takes hours for databases above 10 GB. So at the end of this you have a very out-of-date backup that you can transfer to the other region.<p>Cross-region snapshot mirroring would be a great enhancement feature for AWS.
"EBS snapshots cannot be moved between regions"<p>Not true. I've done this using Ylastic. See <a href="http://ylastic.com/features.html" rel="nofollow">http://ylastic.com/features.html</a>:<p>"Migrate EBS linux snapshots between regions."<p>"Migrate EBS windows snapshots between regions."<p>Takes a few minutes to kick off and does it all for you.
I know this is a little late for your case but you can migrate snapshots from 1 region to another. We spend sunday moving from US-East 1 to US-West 1 and took 2 hours to setup our entire infrastructure consisting of 20 servers & about 180 GB database<p>There are several options<p>1. Manually - <a href="http://alestic.com/2010/10/ec2-ami-copy" rel="nofollow">http://alestic.com/2010/10/ec2-ami-copy</a><p>2. Automatically via Scripts
a) migrate-ebs-image.pl - <a href="http://search.cpan.org/~lds/VM-EC2/bin/migrate-ebs-image.pl" rel="nofollow">http://search.cpan.org/~lds/VM-EC2/bin/migrate-ebs-image.pl</a>
b) CloudyScript Migrate SnapShot - <a href="https://cloudyscripts.com/tool/show/4" rel="nofollow">https://cloudyscripts.com/tool/show/4</a>
c) CloudyScript Migrate AMI - <a href="https://cloudyscripts.com/tool/show/5" rel="nofollow">https://cloudyscripts.com/tool/show/5</a><p>3. Commercial Services
a) <a href="http://ylastic.com/" rel="nofollow">http://ylastic.com/</a>
b) RightScale<p>* ylastic is really cheap at $25 / month
* I used the perl script migrate-ebs-image.pl, super simple to install and use.
* CloudyScripts has open sourced their Ruby gem so you can build on top of it. They also have a free web form you can just use (but may not be secure enough). But you can launch their AMI in your own instance which should be secure<p>Hope that helps for next time!