Make Your AMI Publicly Available For Use In Amazon EC2

 

Introduction

You have the option to share your AMI with all AWS accounts, making it publicly accessible. To avoid public sharing of your AMIs, you can activate the block public access feature. This feature prevents any attempts to share an AMI publicly, which helps safeguard against unauthorized access and possible misuse of AMI information. Keep in mind that turning on block public access will not impact the AMIs that are already publicly available; they will continue to be accessible to the public.

Considerations

Consider the following before making an AMI public:

• Ownership-To make an AMI public, your AWS account must own the AMI.

• Region- AMIs function as a resource within a specific region. When you distribute an AMI, it can only be accessed in the original region from which it was shared. To make an AMI accessible in another region, you need to duplicate the AMI to that region before sharing it.

• Block Public Access- To share an AMI publicly, you must turn off the block public access setting for AMIs in every Region where the AMI will be shared. Once you have made the AMI public, you can activate the block public access for AMIs again to stop any further public sharing of your AMIs.

• Some AMIs Can't Be Made Public- If your AMI includes Encrypted Volumes, Snapshots of Encrypted Volumes, and Product Codes, then you can’t make it public but you can share the AMI with specific AWS accounts.

• Avoid Exposing Sensitive Data- To avoid exposing sensitive data when you share an AMI, follow the recommended actions of the security considerations in Recommendations for creating shared Linux AMIs.

• Usage- When you distribute an AMI, users are permitted solely to launch instances from it. They do not have the ability to delete, share, or alter the AMI. Nevertheless, once they have launched an instance based on your AMI, they can create their own AMI from the instance they initiated.

• Automatic Deprecation- The default deprecation date for all public AMIs is established as two years from when the AMI is created. You have the option to designate an earlier deprecation date than the two-year mark. To remove the deprecation date or extend it, you need to make the AMI private by sharing it exclusively with certain AWS accounts.

• Remove Obsolete AMIs- Once a public AMI reaches its end-of-life date, and if no new instances have been created from the AMI for a period of six months or longer, AWS will eventually retract the public sharing feature to prevent outdated AMIs from showing up in the public AMI catalogs.

• Billing- You are not billed when your AMI is used by other AWS accounts to launch instances. The accounts that launch instances using the AMI are billed for the instances that they launch.

Share an AMI with all AWS Accounts (Share Publicly)

Once you set an AMI to public, it becomes accessible in the Community AMIs section of the console, which you can find in the AMI Catalog on the left sidebar of the EC2 console or during the instance launch process using the console. Be aware that there may be a slight delay before an AMI is listed in Community AMIs after you make it public.

Conclusion

Many aspects of making your AMI publicly available for use in Amazon EC2 are discussed.