An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) defines the programs and settings that will be applied when you launch an EC2 instance. Once you've finished configuring the data, services, and applications on your instance, you can save your work as a custom AMI stored in Amazon EC2. You can scale out your site using this custom AMI to launch additional instances.
Creating a custom AMI copies any Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes that you may have attached. Be aware that this affects your costs when the custom AMI is deployed. For example, you may have a 100 GB attached EBS volume on your current EC2 instance. If you create a custom AMI from your instance and deploy it five times, you'll be charged for five new EC2 instances and five 100 GB EBS volumes.
Once you configure an EC2 instance and its attached EBS volumes the exact way you want them, follow instructions provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) to create your own AMI using the AWS Management Console.
Creating a custom AMI makes an exact copy of the current state of your EC2 instance. Before creating a custom AMI, remove all personal information from your EC2 instance, including stored information such as web browser cookies and temporary files.
Once you've launched new instances using the custom AMI, place them beneath an Amazon Load Balancer, thereby creating a siloed architecture. Note that this architecture does not provide any way for the GIS servers to communicate with each other. If you want a multiple-machine ArcGIS Server site instead, build it using the ArcGIS Enterprise Cloud Builder Command Line Interface for Amazon Web Services.
License:
AMIs that you create with ArcGIS software are for individual use and are allowed only for the purpose of configuring your own ArcGIS Server deployment on AWS. They are not to be redistributed or shared with any other party.