For Amazon EBS-backed instances, CreateImage creates and registers the AMI in a single request, so you don't have to register the AMI yourself.
You can also use RegisterImage
to create an Amazon EBS-backed Linux AMI from a snapshot of a root device volume. For more information, see Launching an Instance from a Snapshot in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud User Guide.
Some Linux distributions, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), use the EC2 billingProduct
code associated with an AMI to verify subscription status for package updates. Creating an AMI from an EBS snapshot does not maintain this billing code, and subsequent instances launched from such an AMI will not be able to connect to package update infrastructure.
Similarly, although you can create a Windows AMI from a snapshot, you can't successfully launch an instance from the AMI.
To create Windows AMIs or to create AMIs for Linux operating systems that must retain AMI billing codes to work properly, see CreateImage.
If needed, you can deregister an AMI at any time. Any modifications you make to an AMI backed by an instance store volume invalidates its registration. If you make changes to an image, deregister the previous image and register the new image.
You can't register an image where a secondary (non-root) snapshot has AWS Marketplace product codes.