An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is a pre-configured virtual machine image that is used to create instances on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). It contains all of the necessary software and configurations that are needed to launch a virtual machine, including the operating system, applications, libraries, and other dependencies.
An AMI is stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and can be used to launch an EC2 instance. When you launch an instance from an AMI, the instance will have the same software and configurations as the AMI. This allows you to quickly and easily create new instances that are configured exactly the way you want them to be.
<p>You can choose from a variety of pre-configured AMIs provided by Amazon, or you can create your own custom AMI by launching an EC2 instance from a base image and installing and configuring the software you need. AMIs can be shared with other AWS accounts or made public, allowing others to use them to launch their own instances.
