- Let's talk about the Amazon Machine Image.
So an Amazon Machine Image is where all EC2 instances start.
An Amazon Machine Image is essentially
a bit-for-bit copy of the root volume.
In this particular example the root volume
could be an EBS volume, an Elastic Block Store volume,
or it could be an instance store
and we're gonna talk about
what exactly that means coming up,
but on that root device we have our operating system,
we have whatever applications were installed,
we have users and groups and we have
however things are configured so on and so forth.
If we then create an image from that,
that bit-for-bit copy will contain the operating system,
the applications and all the configurations.
From there, these Amazon Machine Images are stored in S3,
but they're stored in sort of like this admin zone
that we don't have direct access to.
We don't really have direct access to the raw data
that makes up the Amazon Machine Image,
but we do know that those machine images are stored in S3
and we'll talk more about why that's important later
when we cover storage.
From that image, that will allow us
to launch clones of the original machine.
So if we install, let's say we install Linux and Apache
and our application on this machine
and then we want to clone that,
we would first create the machine image
and then use that image to launch an exact copy
of that machine over and over again.
We could launch one clone, we could launch 1,000 clones.
That would be up to us,
but whatever machines are launched from that machine image
will all come out exactly the same.
So again Amazon Machine Images
are where all EC2 instances start.
They are a bit-for-bit copy of the root volume
and when you clone those machines,
they will all have the same OS,
the same applications installed
and will all be configured in the same way.