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darkAsPitch
Asked: 2011-03-10 17:08:31 +0800 CST

Why Can I Not Create A Micro Instance Of My Newly Created AMI?

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I started with a 64 bit version of Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic server edition. (using a micro instance on Amazon EC2, costing less than $0.01 per hour)

I added GNOME desktop to it and NX server.

I re-bundled the instance into a new AMI.

Now upon trying to start another instance of my freshly created AMI. I am unable to select a "micro"/cheap server format.

What have I done wrong? What triggered this limitation?

Is Amazon really smart enough to know which AMIs will work on which Servers? I had it running fine on a micro server while I re-bundled it..?

ubuntu amazon-ec2 cloud-computing amazon-ami

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Micro instances must be EBS backed, they cannot be AMI backed. You will convert it.

    Micro Instance 613 MB of memory, Up to 2 EC2 Compute Units (for short periodic bursts), EBS storage only, 32-bit or 64-bit platform"

    http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#What_kind_of_hardware_will_my_application_stack_run_on

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  2. I'm not sure why you wouldn't be able to launch your AMI in a new micro instance but I think there's a bit of confusion here. Just to be clear, AMI and EBS are not two different options for backing instances. EBS and S3 are the two options for backing AMIs (from documentation located here under Using Amazon EC2 -> Using AMIs -> AMI Basics). Your AMI is very likely still backed by EBS and, therefore, acceptable for use with a micro instance. Something else must be going on.

    All AMIs are categorized as either backed by Amazon EBS or backed by Amazon S3. The former means that the root device is an Amazon EBS snapshot and appears as an Amazon EBS volume when an instance is launched from the AMI. The latter means that the root device is stored in Amazon S3 and appears as local storage when an instance is launched from the AMI.

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