Users could choose kernels other than the default when booting an PVM AMI. 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, Microsoft). 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.Ĭurrent AMIs are available for hardware virtualized machines (HVM) where the operating system is installed as it would be on real hardware. The AMI filesystem is compressed, encrypted, signed, split into a series of 10 MB chunks and uploaded into Amazon S3 for storage. A block device mapping that specifies the volumes to attach to the instance when it's launched.

Launch permissions that control which AWS accounts can use the AMI to launch instances.

A template for the root volume for the instance (for example, an operating system, an application server, and applications).

Like all virtual appliances, the main component of an AMI is a read-only filesystem image that includes an operating system (e.g., Linux, Unix, or Windows) and any additional software required to deliver a service or a portion of it. It serves as the basic unit of deployment for services delivered using EC2.

An Amazon Machine Image ( AMI) is a special type of virtual appliance that is used to create a virtual machine within the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud ('EC2').

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