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Creating Your Own AMIs
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When the available public AMIs do not address what you're looking for, you have a number of options for obtaining just the right AMI for your needs. You can create your own AMIs from scratch or from customized instances.
![[Note]](http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/docs-common/images/note.png) | Note |
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Although some customers and third-party documentation refer to creating AMIs as bundling, we use the term in this documentation only to refer to the process of creating Amazon EC2 instance store-backed AMIs. |
Creating your own AMIs helps you make the most of Amazon EC2. Your AMIs become the basic unit of deployment; they enable you to rapidly boot new custom instances as you need them. This section gives an overview of your options, maps the process flow, identifies the tools you need, and walks you through the steps.
We assume that you have considered the public AMIs and decided that they don't meet your requirements. We also assume that you're familiar with AMI and instance concepts.
For background information, see the following sections:
For information about available AMIs , see Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) on the web.
