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Finding a Suitable AMI

This section describes how to find an AMI.

AWS Management Console

To find a suitable AMI

Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.
Click AMIs in the Navigation pane.
The console displays your AMIs and all public AMIs.
To reduce the number of displayed AMIs, select options from the Viewing list boxes. For example, you might want to display Amazon images.
After locating your desired AMI, write down its AMI ID. You can use this to launch instances of the AMI or register your own AMI, using this as a baseline.

Command Line Tools

To find a suitable AMI

Use the ec2-describe-images command.

	Tip
	You can filter this list to return only certain types of AMIs of interest to you. For more information about how to filter the results, go to ec2-describe-images in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Command Line Reference.

The command lists your AMIs and Amazon's public AMIs. The following example shows only part of the resulting output.

PROMPT> ec2-describe-images -o self -o amazon

IMAGE	ami-d8699bb1	amazon/ami-vpc-nat-1.0.0-beta.i386-ebs	amazon	available	public		i386	machine	aki-407d9529			ebs	paravirtual	xen
BLOCKDEVICEMAPPING	/dev/sda1		snap-33d88c5f	8	
IMAGE	ami-c6699baf	amazon/ami-vpc-nat-1.0.0-beta.x86_64-ebs	amazon	available	public		x86_64	machine	aki-427d952b			ebs	paravirtual	xen
BLOCKDEVICEMAPPING	/dev/sda1		snap-57d88c3b	8	
IMAGE	ami-30f30659	amazon/amzn-ami-0.9.7-beta.i386-ebs	amazon	available	public		i386	machine	aki-407d9529			ebs	paravirtual	xen
BLOCKDEVICEMAPPING	/dev/sda1		snap-d895cdb3	10	
IMAGE	ami-0af30663	amazon/amzn-ami-0.9.7-beta.x86_64-ebs	amazon	available	public		x86_64	machine	aki-427d952b			ebs	paravirtual	xen
BLOCKDEVICEMAPPING	/dev/sda1		snap-f295cd99	10	
IMAGE	ami-3ac33653	amazon/amzn-ami-0.9.8-beta.i386-ebs	amazon	available	public		i386	machine	aki-407d9529			ebs	paravirtual	xen
BLOCKDEVICEMAPPING	/dev/sda1		snap-14ba967f	10	
IMAGE	ami-38c33651	amazon/amzn-ami-0.9.8-beta.x86_64-ebs	amazon	available	public		x86_64	machine	aki-427d952b			ebs	paravirtual	xen
BLOCKDEVICEMAPPING	/dev/sda1		snap-10b9957b	10	
IMAGE	ami-08728661	amazon/amzn-ami-0.9.9-beta.i386-ebs	amazon	available	public		i386	machine	aki-407d9529			ebs	paravirtual	xen
BLOCKDEVICEMAPPING	/dev/sda1		snap-674a930d	10	
IMAGE	ami-2272864b	amazon/amzn-ami-0.9.9-beta.x86_64-ebs	amazon	available	public		x86_64	machine	aki-427d952b			ebs	paravirtual	xen
BLOCKDEVICEMAPPING	/dev/sda1		snap-8926ffe3	10	
IMAGE	ami-76f0061f	amazon/amzn-ami-2010.11.1-beta.i386-ebs	amazon	available	public		i386	machine	aki-407d9529			ebs	paravirtual	xen
BLOCKDEVICEMAPPING	/dev/sda1		snap-cba692a1	8	
IMAGE	ami-74f0061d	amazon/amzn-ami-2010.11.1-beta.x86_64-ebs	amazon	available	public		x86_64	machine	aki-427d952b			ebs	paravirtual	xen
BLOCKDEVICEMAPPING	/dev/sda1		snap-ffa69295	8	
IMAGE	ami-8c1fece5	amazon/amzn-ami-2011.02.1.i386-ebs	amazon	available	public		i386	machine	aki-407d9529			ebs	paravirtual	xen
BLOCKDEVICEMAPPING	/dev/sda1		snap-22fc264e	8	
IMAGE	ami-8e1fece7	amazon/amzn-ami-2011.02.1.x86_64-ebs	amazon	available	public		x86_64	machine	aki-427d952b			ebs	paravirtual	xen
BLOCKDEVICEMAPPING	/dev/sda1		snap-a6fc26ca	8

In the following sections, we're going to launch an instance of the AMI with ID ami-b232d0db.

API

To find a suitable AMI

Construct the following Query request, which returns all Amazon-owned AMIs:

https://ec2.amazonaws.com/
?Action=DescribeImages
&User.1=amazon
&...auth parameters...

Following is an example response.

<DescribeImagesResponse xmlns="http://ec2.amazonaws.com/doc/2011-12-15/">
  <imagesSet>
        <item>
          <imageId>ami-8c1fece5</imageId>
          <imageLocation>amazon/amzn-ami-2011.02.1.i386-ebs</imageLocation>
          <imageState>available</imageState>
          <imageOwnerId>137112412989</imageOwnerId>
          <isPublic>true</isPublic>
          <architecture>i386</architecture>
          <imageType>machine</imageType>
          <kernelId>aki-407d9529</kernelId>
          <imageOwnerAlias>amazon</imageOwnerAlias>
          <name>amzn-ami-2011.02.1.i386-ebs</name>
          <description>Amazon Linux AMI i386 EBS</description>
          <rootDeviceType>ebs</rootDeviceType>
          <rootDeviceName>/dev/sda1</rootDeviceName>
          <blockDeviceMapping>
            <item>
              <deviceName>/dev/sda1</deviceName>
              <ebs>
                <snapshotId>snap-22fc264e</snapshotId>
                <volumeSize>8</volumeSize>
                <deleteOnTermination>true</deleteOnTermination>
              </ebs>
            </item>
          </blockDeviceMapping>
          <virtualizationType>paravirtual</virtualizationType>
          <hypervisor>xen</hypervisor>
        </item>
  </imagesSet>

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