Provides the information required to launch an instance

You can turn your EC2 instances into AMIs so you can create copies of your servers.

It holds:

• A template for the root volume for the instance (EBS Snapshot or Instance Store template)
• Launch permissions
• A block device mapping that specifies the volumes to attach to the instance

<aside> 💡 AMIs are Region specific. If you want to use an AMI in another Region, you will need to copy the AMI.

</aside>

• Community AMI — Free AMIs maintained by the community
• AWS Marketplace — Free or Paid subscription AMIs maintained by vendors

AMI Use Case

Help you keep incremental changes to your OS, application code and systems packages.

Using Systems Manager Automation you can routinely patch your AMIs with security updates and bake those AMIs.

AMIs are used with LaunchConfigurations. When you want to roll out updates to multiple instances, you make a copy of your LaunchConfiguration with new AMI.

Example:

• web-server-000
  • Ruby, Node, Postgres Client Installed
• web-server-001
  • Redis for Sidekiq Installed
• web-server-002
  • ImageMagick for Image Processing Installed
• web-server-003
  • CloudWatch Agent Installed