Cost of storing AMI

108
votes

I understand Amazon will charge per GB provisioned EBS storage. If I create AMI of my instance, does this mean my EBS volume will be duplicated, and hence incur additional cost?

Is there other cost charge in creating and storing an AMI (Amazon Machine Image)?

2
amazon-web-servicesamazon-ec2

2 Answers

121
votes

You are only charged for the storage of the bits that make up your AMI, there are no charges for creating an AMI.

  • EBS-backed AMIs are made up of snapshots of the EBS volumes that form the AMI. You will pay storage fees for those snapshots according to the rates listed here. Your EBS volumes are not "duplicated" until the instance is launched, at which point a volume is created from the stored snapshots and you'll pay regular EBS volume fees and EBS snapshot billing.
  • S3-backed AMIs have their information stored in S3 and you will pay storage fees for the data being stored in S3 according to the S3 pricing, whether the instance is running or not.
25
votes

In this case, you will pay for the size of the storage used, instead of the storage provisioned. Snapshots will not store any empty blocks.