An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is an encrypted machine image stored in Amazon S3. It contains all the information necessary to boot instances of your software.

Launch permission granted to a specific user.

Once an AMI has been launched, the resulting running system is referred to as an instance. All instances based on the same AMI start out identical and any information on them is lost when the instances are terminated or fail.

Also known as a security group, groups define firewall rules that can be shared among a group of instances that have similar security requirements. The group is specified at instance launch.

AMI attribute allowing users to launch an AMI

An AMI that all users have launch permissions for.

A collection of instances started as part of the same launch request.

AMIs that developers build and make available for other AWS developers to use.