Technical Articles: Single EC2 Instance Part 9

WARNING: Do not test this restore process in a production environment.

We just did a backup of the client's EC2 instance. We will see what a restoration process looks like.

The restored EC2 instance will have the same "Private IP" as the EC2 instance being backed up. In other words, the "Private IP" is restored as well. This is means that if we perform a restore while the original EC2 instance is still around, the restore will fail because a single "private IP" cannot be held by 2 EC2 instances at the same time. Therefore, in this demo, we will need to terminate the original EC2 instance first. (We obviously do not want to terminate client's working EC2 instance in a real life environment. But if client's EC2 instance is not working, and thus needed a restore, we will need to terminate the non-working client's EC2 instance first, so that the restore can complete later on.)

Right click the (non-working and thus needed to be restored) EC2 instance,
"Instance State", "Terminate".

Do not tick "Release Elastic IPs..." as we want to keep it. (The client's public names should be pointing to this elastic IP.)
Click "Yes, Terminate".

This is what it looks like when an EC2 instance is terminated.
Notice that it no longer holds any IP addresses.

To keep things tidy, delete the CloudWatch alarm monitoring the terminated EC2 instance.

Just for the demo, this is to prove that the EC2 instance is really terminated.

Log into the Backup Server's web based GUI.
Look for the backup, click "Recover".

Click "Instance".

"Recover Instance".

"OK".

Recovery / restore in progress.

Click "Open Recovery Monitor".

Wait till it displays "Recovery Successful",
then go back to AWS.

This is what the restored EC2 instance looks like.
Notice that it has the same "Private IP", and same "Name" too.

Just for this demo, we are renaming the restored EC2 instance so that it is easier to tell it apart from the terminated EC2 instance.

We need to "associate" the elastic IP with the restored EC2 instance.
(The elastic IP was allocated to us when we first created the original EC2 instance.)