Creating an AMI from a Running Amazon EBS-backed Instance

The following steps will instruct you on how to create an AMI from a running Amazon EBS-backed Instance:

• Firstly, open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.
• Now, in the “Navigation” pane select “US East (Virginia)” from the “Region” drop-down menu.
• Click on “Instances” in the “Navigation” pane.
• Right-click on your running instance on the “Instances” page, and select “Create Image (EBS AMI)”.

The “Create Image” dialog box will appear.

• You will now be required to fill-in a unique image name and an optional description for it (not more than 255 characters), and click on “Create This Image”.

Tip: If one is familiar with Amazon EC2 instance store-backed AMIs, the image name        replaces the manifest name, which uniquely identifies each Amazon EC2 instance store- backed AMI (e.g., s3_bucket/something_of_your_choice.manifest.xml).

Amazon EC2 will automatically power down the instance, take images of any volumes     that were attached, create and register the AMI, and then reboot the instance.

If you go to the AMIs page and view the AMI’s status, you will see that the status is shown as “pending” while the new AMI is being created.

Once your new AMI’s status shows “available”, you should go to the “Snapshots” page, and view the snapshot that was created for the new AMI. Any instance that will be        launched by you from the new AMI will use this snapshot for its root device volume. You also have the option to update your Auto-Scaling group with the new AMI (we will      do this as part of the AWS CloudFormation step).