Amazon EC2 AMI Lifecycle (Part 6)

By Ashwin Venugopal -

 






How Amazon EC2 AMI copy works?

Creating a copy of a source AMI produces a new AMI that is identical but distinct, commonly known as the target AMI. The target AMI comes with its unique AMI ID. Modifying or deregistering the source AMI will not impact the target AMI. Likewise, changes to the target AMI have no effect on the source AMI.

When using an EBS-backed AMI, each of its underlying snapshots is replicated to a separate but identical target snapshot. When an AMI is copied to a different Region, the snapshots created are complete copies, not incremental ones. If you choose to encrypt unencrypted backing snapshots or change them to a new KMS key, the resulting snapshots will also be complete copies rather than incremental ones. Any further copy operations of an AMI will yield incremental copies of the associated snapshots.

Cross-Region copying

Copying an AMI across geographically diverse Regions provides the following benefits:

  • Consistent global deployment: Copying an AMI from one Region to another enables you to launch consistent instances in different Regions based on the same AMI.

  • Scalability: You can more easily design and build global applications that meet the needs of your users, regardless of their location.

  • Performance: You can increase performance by distributing your application, as well as locating critical components of your application in closer proximity to your users. You can also take advantage of Region-specific features, such as instance types or other AWS services.

  • High availability: You can design and deploy applications across AWS Regions, to increase availability.

Prerequisite

Before copying an AMI, it is essential to verify that the source AMI's contents are modified to function in another Region. For instance, any database connection strings or relevant application configuration details should be revised to link to the correct resources. Failing to do so may result in instances initiated from the new AMI in the target Region continuing to utilize resources from the original Region, potentially affecting performance and increasing costs.

Limitations

  1. Destination Regions are limited to 300 concurrent AMI copy operations. This also applies to time-based AMI copy operations.
  2. You can't copy a paravirtual (PV) AMI to a Region that does not support PV AMIs.

Cross-account copying

If an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) from a different AWS account is shared with your account, you have the ability to copy that shared AMI. This process is referred to as cross-account copying. The AMI that has been shared with you serves as the source AMI. When you perform a copy of the source AMI, you generate a new AMI. The new AMI is commonly referred to as the target AMI.

AMI Costs

  • For a shared AMI, the account of the shared AMI is charged for the storage in the Region.
  • If you copy an AMI that is shared with your account, you are the owner of the target AMI in your account.
    • The owner of the source AMI is charged standard Amazon EBS or Amazon S3 transfer fees.     
    • You are charged for the storage of the target AMI in the destination Region.

Conclusion

Various methods of copying an AMI are discussed.



































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