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/ emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve specialized har ...

within the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud ("EC2"). It serves as the basic unit of deployment for services delivered using EC2.

Like all

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

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser 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 group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ...

) 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 S3 or Amazon Simple Storage Service 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 ...

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,

Canonical The adjective canonical is applied in many contexts to mean "according to the canon" the standard, rule or primary source that is accepted as authoritative for the body of knowledge or literature in that context. In mathematics, "canonical examp ...

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation, multinational technology company, technology corporation producing Software, computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at th ...

). 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. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, ...

OpenSolaris OpenSolaris () is a discontinued open-source computer operating system based on Solaris and created by Sun Microsystems. It was also, perhaps confusingly, the name of a project initiated by Sun to build a developer and user community around t ...

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

Windows Server 2003 Windows Server 2003 is the sixth version of Windows Server operating system produced by Microsoft. It is part of the Windows NT family of operating systems and was released to manufacturing on March 28, 2003 and generally available on April 24, ...

and

Windows Server 2008 Windows Server 2008 is the fourth release of the Windows Server operating system produced by Microsoft as part of the Windows NT family of the operating systems. It was released to manufacturing on February 4, 2008, and generally to retail on F ...

operating systems to the list of available

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

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

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular ...

; in March 2011,

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

AMIs became available. In November 2012,

Windows Server 2012 Windows Server 2012, codenamed "Windows Server 8", is the sixth version of the Windows Server operating system by Microsoft, as part of the Windows NT family of operating systems. It is the server version of Windows based on Windows 8 and succ ...

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 software, commercial Open-source software, open-source Linux distribution developed by Red Hat for the commerce, commercial market. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is released in server versions for x86-6 ...

. 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, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was originally authored in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386-based PC, and it was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU ...

. Amazon Linux 2 changed from System V init system to systemd boot. It was announced in June 2018, and is updated on a regular basis.

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 AMI Software appliances Software distribution Virtualization software

Contents

Operating systems

Amazon Linux AMI

Types of images

References

External links