I have a running/existing EC2 instance with Windows Server 2008 with instance backed, how do i create an AMI from this existing instance?
Under "EC2 Service Settings" on the existing instance, select if you want to run sysprep after the bundled instance is re-instantiated.
Then, go to the AWS management console, right-click your instance, and click "Bundle". Select your credentials and destination S3 bucket.
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Do EC2 instances automatically save changes made inside a running instance?
For example, after creating an EC2 Windows 2019 instance, I login as Administrator using RDP and install some software. If the EC2 instance is terminated or rebooted, will the software still be installed when I restart the EC2 instance?
In layman terms, you should consider your EC2 instance as a new virtual machine running on cloud. Terminate is used to delete an EC2 instance. AWS docs say:
An instance reboot is equivalent to an operating system reboot. In most cases, it takes only a few minutes to reboot your instance. When you reboot an instance, it keeps its public DNS name (IPv4), private IPv4 address, IPv6 address (if applicable), and any data on its instance store volumes.
If you terminate the instance its lost but if you restart the instance all the installed softwares will be there but if you want to create another instance with the same packages installed then you can create AMI out of instance and next time use that AMI to create new instance and all softwares will be preinstalled in the new win instance
I want to mention the host name of the instance in the Cloud Formation Template while launching the teplate for a windows instance. How can I do that?
The user data field is not getting executed since it was not enabled. Need to enable user-data in ec2-config in windows machine and stop the machine and then take the AMI. By using new AMI this would work.
Currently we are hosting a customer's instance in our Amazon EC2 Account. We would like to move this to the customer's account so that the billing is transferred.
Is there an easy way to simply migrate an instance to a different Amazon Cloud account?
No, you cannot move an running instance from one account to another.
You can however create an AMI of that instance and share the AMI with the other account. Take note of "Sharing an AMI with Specific Users":
http://aws.amazon.com/articles/530
Do I need to create an EC2 instance in order to remotely connect to my Amazon RDS instance?
I understand that setting up an Amazon RDS instance automagically creates an EC2 instance 'in the background'. But when looking into my EC2 console I don't see that hidden instance so I can't find the details for the public DNS or Elastic IP, neither the EC2 instance key that I need to connect through SSH.
Yes, an RDS instance creates an EC2 instance to run the database but you don't have direct access to it via ssh, which is kind of the point.
RDS is a service that is managed for you and the idea is to hide the implementation details and simply provide an endpoint to connect to from another EC2 instance. You can find the endpoint name in the EC2 console - just use this as the hostname to connect to from your application and you can treat RDS just like any other database.
Amazon need to maintain a level of control over the server in order to provide it as a service and ssh access would interfere with that. There are a few things you miss out on because of this (e.g. direct access to DB files) but these are far outweighed by having Amazon manage upgrades, backups and replication for you.
My goal is to launch 200 instance of windows node of the same ami in aws. These node come up and connect to my head node. Now, every launch of a new node create a new password for that node. This is hard to manage specially if I want to do group remote maitenance.
I was thinking, maybe I can make all of specific ami to have the same password but do I do that ? Should I modify sysprep condfig file C:\Program Files\Amazon\Ec2ConfigService\sysprep2008.xml or should I disable both set password for the ec2 config tool and then create a AMI?
If the config file, what exactly should I put in the sysprep2008.xml file?