Create your own AMI—Documentation (10.3 and 10.3.1) | Documentation for ArcGIS Enterprise

An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) defines the programs and settings that will be applied when you launch an EC2 instance. Once you have finished configuring the data, services, and applications on your ArcGIS Server instance, you can save your work as a custom AMI stored in Amazon EC2. You can scale out your site by using this custom AMI to launch additional instances.

When you build a site using ArcGIS Server Cloud Builder on Amazon Web Services, you don’t have to know how to save a custom AMI. You create and use site templates, which manage the custom AMIs for you behind the scenes. See Create a site template to learn how to get started.

If you decide to build your ArcGIS Server site using the AWS Management Console, use the instructions in this topic to create a custom AMI and launch the instances manually.

Once you have launched new instances using the custom AMI, place them beneath an Amazon Load Balancer, thereby creating a siloed architecture. However, this architecture does not provide any way for the GIS servers to communicate with each other. If you want the full benefits of the newer ArcGIS Server architecture, build your site using ArcGIS Server Cloud Builder on Amazon Web Services.

Creating a custom AMI copies any Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes that you may have attached. Be aware that this affects your costs when the custom AMI is deployed. For example, you may have a 100 GB attached EBS volume on your current EC2 instance. If you create a custom AMI from your instance and deploy it five times, you will be charged for five new EC2 instances and five 100 GB EBS volumes.

Use the following procedure to create your own AMI using the AWS Management Console: