Amazon Machine Image (AMI) vs Snapshots
DevOps Enthusiast, Cloud and Storage Engineer. LinkedIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hemant9singh
In this blog, we will talk about the basic differences between an AMI and Snapshot in AWS.
What is an AMI?
AMI's are used to create a virtual machine within the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
The machine images are like templates that are configured with an operating system and other software that determine the user's operating environment. AMI types are categorized according to region, operating system, system architecture -- 32- or 64-bit -- launch permissions and whether they are backed by Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) or backed by the instance store.
What is a Snapshot?
EBS Snapshots is a point-in-time copy of your data and can be used to enable disaster recovery, migrate data across regions and accounts, and improve backup compliance. You can create and manage your EBS Snapshots through the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI).
From the above, it's clear, that with an AMI you can launch an instance and each instance has its snapshot attached to it.
Snapshots are just the copy of your data, do not store instance configurations in them.
Having said that, you can create an AMI from a snapshot.
To create an AMI from a snapshot using the console
Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.
In the navigation pane, under Elastic Block Store, choose Snapshots.
Choose the snapshot and choose Actions, Create Image.
In the Create Image from EBS Snapshot dialog box, complete the fields to create your AMI, then choose to Create. If you're re-creating a parent instance, then choose the same options as the parent instance.
. Architecture: Choose i386 for 32-bit or x86_64 for 64-bit.
. Root device name: Enter the appropriate name for the root volume. For more information, see Device Naming on Linux instances.
. Virtualization type: Choose whether instances launched from this AMI use paravirtual (PV) or hardware virtual machine (HVM) virtualization. For more information, see Linux AMI virtualization types.
