What is the difference between an Instance AMI and Snaphots in AWS

Question

AMI, Snapshot and Instances all are related to Amazon EC2, it is confusing, can any one explain me, what is the difference between an Instance, AMI and Snaphots in AWS? also What are they used for?

Answer 1

• AMI is the Amazon Machine Image which provides you the required information to launch the instance like what type of OS you need, what software you want to install in it and etc.
• Basically, your AMI can be the one which AWS gives you like Linux, windows, Redhat, etc or it can be your custom AMI which saves your time and money as it creates a blueprint of the software you installed and configuration which you have in your instance, so that whenever there is a need you need just relaunch it, instead of recreating it.
• It has also an option of transferring an AMI from one region to another region
• Whereas your instance is like your building which you build on top of the blueprint that is your AMI. It is used to compute the data in your application or to host the application.
• The major advantage of this is that you pay only for what you use and it can scale according to your need.
• Snapshot is a just a snap of your volume which is attached with your instance or database. So that wherever you need to your data back, you can then create a volume from the snapshot.

To know how to retrive an EC2 instance from a Snapshot have a look at this - https://www.edureka.co/blog/restore-ec2-from-snapshot/

Hope this helps!

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Thanks!