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We had to split an Amazon account into two accounts to better track usage between departments on the company.

To transfer a server, we made an AMI of the EC2 server and shared it privately with the new account. The new account was able to instantiate the EC2 server successfully.

That server is stopped in the old account, and the AMI is still shared privately.

So the doubts boil down to:

  • Is the instantiated server dependant on the shared AMI?
  • Is it safe to terminate the EC2 instance on the old account, and to unshared and deregister the AMI?
  • Would the new Account will still be able to run the instantiated server?
  • Is it possible to make a new AMI on the new Account after deleting the shared AMI on the old account?

Thanks

2 Answers 2

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  • Is the instantiated server dependant on the shared AMI?

    No, once the EC2 instance is created from AMI, there is no connection between 2 anymore.

  • Is it safe to terminate the EC2 instance on the old account, and to unshared and deregister the AMI?

    Yes, it's totally safe.

  • Would the new Account will still be able to run the instantiated server?

    Yes.

  • Is it possible to make a new AMI on the new Account after deleting the shared AMI on the old account?

    Yes, you can anytime create a AMI out of your running instance and use that further to create new instances out of it.

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  • Confirmed. No need to worry anymore and everything is working as expected Jan 11, 2013 at 21:16
  • As a follow up, do you happen to know what the behavior in an autoscaling group would be? e.g., if the AMI is removed in the account that created it, will an ASG in the account it's shared with be able to launch new instances? Oct 28, 2015 at 4:28
  • Not very sure. Sorry.
    – Napster_X
    Dec 17, 2015 at 17:11
  • I also followed the above steps but the new server that I launched on shared AMI is not working. serverfault.com/questions/1105831/…
    – paul
    Jul 17, 2022 at 17:42
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An AMI image is just a snapshot of an EC2 instance at a point in time. It's like taking a picture. The AMI image is not dependent on the EC2 instance and the EC2 instance is not dependent on the AMi image.

When you create a new EC2 instance from an existing AMI, the AMI is essentially copied to the EC2 instance. The instance has a record of the AMI that created it, but it's not tied to the AMI image in any way.

It is safe to delete the AMI image once you are sure that you will no longer need to create new EC2 instances from it. You can safely create a new AMI in your new account before or after deleting the original AMI image.

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