An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is a supported and maintained image provided by AWS that provides the information required to launch an instance. You must specify an AMI when you launch an instance. You can launch multiple instances from a single AMI when you require multiple instances with the same configuration.

Storage for the root device. All AMIs are categorized as either backed by Amazon EBS or backed by instance store. Amazon EBS-backed AMI – The root device for an instance launched from the AMI is an Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume created from an Amazon EBS snapshot.

An AWS AMI is a template that contains a software configuration (for example, an operating system, an application server, and applications). From an AMI, you launch an instance, which is a copy of the AMI running as a virtual server in the cloud.

To create a custom AMI:

Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/ . Choose Launch Instance. Choose Community AMIs. If you identified a base Elastic Beanstalk AMI (using describe-platform-version ) or an Amazon Linux AMI, enter its AMI ID in the search box.