Can I just detach an EC2 instance from OpsWorks without deleting the instance?

Question

Many years ago, I created an EC2 instance with OpsWorks set up, as it sounded like a way to automate keeping its Amazon Linux OS up to date.

Fast forward to today, and OpsWorks is being shut down. For some reason the migration script provided for moving it to AWS Systems Manager won't work on this instance (S3 won't allow it to access the bucket the script is in,) and I don't really want to deal with the complexity of Systems Manager for this one instance anyhow.

I just want to break the dependency of this EC2 instance on OpsWorks so I don't have to worry about it somehow failing when OpsWorks is shut down. It runs fine on its own and I can maintain it on my own. Is this possible, or do I really have to rebuild everything on this host from scratch on a new instance?

Accepted Answer

Hi there!

I think the only option that might work is to detach the EBS volume, and launch a new instance with it. Per the [documentation](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/opsworks/latest/userguide/resources-detach.html):

1. Ensure that the instance is in the offline state.
2. On the Resources page, click Volumes and click volume name.
3. On the volume's details page, click Unassign.

I hope this helps.

Can I just detach an EC2 instance from OpsWorks without deleting the instance?

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