[new capability] Amazon EC2 supports disabling Amazon Machine Image (or AMI)

23 Oct 2023 · 2 min read

Housekeeping is always an important activity. Otherwise, soon, it will become an operational and management overhead. Fortunately, Amazon EC2 now supports disabling an Amazon Machine Image (or AMI). Let’s take a closer look.

Imagine there are hundreds of AMIs in your Catalog. Some are outdated, some may be vulnerable, or few are installed with non-compliant software.

So, it is challenging to find the right one and risky if an outdated or vulnerable AMI is chosen by mistake.

There is an option to deregister an AMI. However, that is often not a practical enterprise solution due to compliance or regulatory restrictions.

Here comes this new feature very handy. You can disable AMI now.

Once disabled, it will not appear in the AMI Catalog. You can not share an AMI or launch a new EC2 instance from a disabled AMI. If previously, it was public or shared, it will be made private. AWS account, the organization will lose access to previously shared AMI.

If you disable an AMI, it will not be deleted. So, you will continue paying the storage cost for EBS snapshots. To reduce storage costs, you can archive the snapshots after disabling the AMI.

You can see it by choosing the Disabled Images option.

For any reason, if you decide to reenable, you can do so by clicking Enable AMI.

It will be again available in the AMI catalogue and for sharing. But you need to re-share with AWS accounts or the organizations if they lost access when you disabled the API.

Start using this new capability to simplify and streamline your AMI creation and management workflows without hurting regulatory or compliance requirements.