EC2 Instance Storage : AMI Overview

What is in an AMI?

AMI stands for Amazon Machine Image. We can launch and customize EC2 instances from different kind of AMIs. We can define and set up our own software configuration, operating system, monitoring tool. AMI provides us a faster boot time and configuration time, because, all the software that we want to install onto our EC2 instance is prepackaged through the AMI.

So we have to build our own AMIs and they can be built for a specific region and then they can be copied across region .

So the Amazon Linux 2 AMI is a very popular AMI for AWS and it was provided by AWS themselves, but we can create our own AMI or we can launch an EC2 instance from an AWS Marketplace AMI, which is an AMI that has been made by someone else.

How does it work?

Well we’ll start an EC2 instance and we’ll customize it. Then we will stop the instance to make sure the data integrity is correct, then we can build an AMI from it, so this will also create EBS snapshots behind the scenes and then finally we can launch instances from other AMIs.

I hope you learnt something by this blog. Happy learning !!