Amazon EC2 now supports aliases for Amazon Machine Images (AMIs)

Posted on: May 5, 2020

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) now supports the use of custom identifiers to reference Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) during instance launch. You can create these identifiers using AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store and use them to reference your AMI during instance launch, reducing likelihood of instance misconfiguration and simplifying maintenance of your automation. Code that references these parameters no longer needs to be modified every time a new version of an AMI is created.

The latest versions of commonly used AMIs, including Amazon Linux 2 and Windows, are available to reference using Systems Manager public parameters.

AWS Systems Manager parameters are supported for instance launches in all commercial AWS regions. For more information about using parameters with Amazon EC2 see the documentation.