An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is a special type of

virtual appliance A virtual appliance is a pre-configured virtual machine image, ready to run on a hypervisor; virtual appliances are a subset of the broader class of software appliances. Installation of a software appliance on a virtual machine and packaging that ...

that is used to create a

virtual machine In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization or emulator, emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide the functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve ...

within the

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a part of Amazon's cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), that allows users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications. EC2 encourages scalable deployment of ap ...

(EC2). It serves as the basic unit of deployment for services delivered using EC2. __TOC__

Overview

Like all

s, the main component of an AMI is a read-only filesystem image that includes an operating system (e.g.,

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

Unix Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

, or

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

) and any additional software required to deliver a service or a portion of it. An AMI includes the following: * A template for the root volume for the instance (for example, an operating system, an application server, and applications) * Launch permissions that control which AWS accounts can use the AMI to launch instances * A block device mapping that specifies the volumes to attach to the instance when it's launched The AMI filesystem is compressed, encrypted, signed, split into a series of 10 MB chunks and uploaded into

Amazon S3 Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is a service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that provides object storage through a web service interface. Amazon S3 uses the same scalable storage infrastructure that Amazon.com uses to run its e-commerc ...

for storage. An XML manifest file stores information about the AMI, including name, version, architecture, default kernel id, decryption key and digests for all of the filesystem chunks. Current AMIs are available for hardware virtualized machines (HVM) where the operating system is installed as it would be on real hardware. With the still available older paravirtualized virtual machines (PV), an AMI did not include a kernel image, only a pointer to the default kernel id, which could be chosen from an approved list of safe kernels maintained by Amazon and its partners (e.g.,

Red Hat Red Hat, Inc. (formerly Red Hat Software, Inc.) is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises and is a subsidiary of IBM. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North ...

, Canonical,

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

). Users could choose kernels other than the default when booting an PVM AMI.

Operating systems

When it launched in August 2006, the EC2 service offered

and later

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

OpenSolaris OpenSolaris () is a discontinued open-source computer operating system for SPARC and x86 based systems, created by Sun Microsystems and based on Solaris. Its development began in the mid 2000s and ended in 2010. OpenSolaris was developed as ...

and Solaris Express Community Edition. In October 2008, EC2 added the

Windows Server 2003 Windows Server 2003, codenamed "Whistler Server", is the sixth major version of the Windows NT operating system produced by Microsoft and the first server version to be released under the Windows Server brand name. It is part of the Windows NT ...

and

Windows Server 2008 Windows Server 2008, codenamed "Longhorn Server" (alternatives: "Windows Vista Server" or "Windows Server Vista"), is the seventh major version of the Windows NT operating system produced by Microsoft to be released under the Windows Server b ...

operating systems to the list of available

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

s. As of December 2010, it has also been reported to run

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free-software Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). The first version was released in 1993 developed from 386BSD, one of the first fully functional and free Unix clones on affordable ...

; in March 2011,

NetBSD NetBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). It was the first open-source BSD descendant officially released after 386BSD was fork (software development), forked. It continues to ...

AMIs became available. In November 2012,

Windows Server 2012 Windows Server 2012, codenamed "Windows Server 8", is the ninth major version of the Windows NT operating system produced by Microsoft to be released under the Windows Server brand name. It is the server version of Windows based on Windows ...

support was added.

Amazon Linux AMI

Amazon has its own Linux distribution that is largely binary compatible with

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a commercial Linux distribution developed by Red Hat. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is released in server versions for x86-64, Power ISA, ARM64, and IBM Z and a desktop version for x86-64. Fedora Linux and ...

. This offering has been in production since September 2011, and in development since 2010. The final release of the original Amazon Linux is version 2018.03 and uses version 4.14 of the

Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a Free and open-source software, free and open source Unix-like kernel (operating system), kernel that is used in many computer systems worldwide. The kernel was created by Linus Torvalds in 1991 and was soon adopted as the k ...

. Amazon Linux 2 changed from System V init system to

systemd systemd is a software suite that provides an array of system components for Linux operating systems. The main aim is to unify service configuration and behavior across Linux distributions. Its primary component is a "system and service manage ...

boot. It was announced in June 2018, and is updated on a regular basis. Amazon Linux 2023 was the next version, which launched alongside a new two-yearly release cadence. It comes with various kernel hardening features, and also enables kernel live patching.

Types of images

* Public: an AMI that can be used by anyone. * Paid: a for-pay AMI that is registered with Amazon DevPay and can be used by anyone who subscribes for it. DevPay allows developers to mark-up Amazon's usage fees and optionally add monthly subscription fees. * Shared: a private AMI that can only be used by Amazon EC2 users who are allowed access to it by the developer.

References

External links

Creating and preparing AMIs

Amazon Web Services Developer Community : Amazon Machine Images (AMIs)

Amazon Linux AMI
{{amazon Amazon Web Services Software appliances Software distribution Virtualization software