Deregister an Amazon EC2 AMI - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
ConsiderationsDeregister an AMIAvoid costs from unused resources

Deregister an Amazon EC2 AMI

When you deregister an AMI, Amazon EC2 permanently deletes it. After you deregister an AMI, you can't use it to launch new instances. You might consider deregistering an AMI when you have finished using it.

To protect against accidental or malicious deregistering of an AMI, you can turn on deregistration protection. If you accidentally deregister an EBS-backed AMI, you can use the Recycle Bin to restore it only if you restore it within the allowed time period before it is permanently deleted.

Deregistering an AMI has no effect on any instances that were launched from the AMI. You can continue to use these instances. Deregistering an AMI also has no effect on any snapshots that were created during the AMI creation process. You'll continue to incur usage costs for these instances and storage costs for the snapshots. Therefore, to avoid incurring unnecessary costs, we recommend that you terminate any instances and delete any snapshots that you do not need. For more information, see Avoid costs from unused resources.

For instances launched from an AMI that is subsequently deregistered, you can still view some high-level information about the AMI by using the describe-instance-image-metadata AWS CLI command. For more information, see describe-instance-image-metadata.

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Considerations

  • You can't deregister an AMI that is not owned by your account.

  • You can't use Amazon EC2 to deregister an AMI that is managed by the AWS Backup service. Instead, use AWS Backup to delete the corresponding recovery points in the backup vault. For more information, see Deleting backups in the AWS Backup Developer Guide.

Deregister an AMI

Use any of the following methods to deregister an EBS-backed AMI or instance store-backed AMI.

Console
To deregister an AMI

  1. Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.

  2. In the navigation pane, choose AMIs.

  3. From the filter bar, choose Owned by me to list your available AMIs, or choose Disabled images to list your disabled AMIs.

  4. Select the AMI to deregister.

  5. Choose Actions, Deregister AMI.

  6. When you are prompted for confirmation, choose Deregister AMI.

    It might take a few minutes before the console removes the AMI from the list. Choose Refresh to refresh the status.

AWS CLI
To deregister an AMI

Use the following deregister-image command.

aws ec2 deregister-image --image-id ami-0abcdef1234567890
PowerShell
To deregister an AMI

Use the following Unregister-EC2Image cmdlet.

Unregister-EC2Image -ImageId ami-0abcdef1234567890

Avoid costs from unused resources

Deregistering an AMI doesn't delete all of the resources that are associated with the AMI. These resources include the snapshots for EBS-backed AMIs and the files in Amazon S3 for instance store-backed AMIs. When you deregister an AMI, you also don't terminate or stop any instances launched from the AMI.

You will continue to incur costs for storing the snapshots and files, and you will incur costs for any running instances.

To avoid incurring these types of unnecessary costs, we recommend deleting any resources that you don't need.

EBS-backed AMIs

  • Delete the snapshot of the instance root volume that was created during AMI creation. The description of the snapshot is structured as follows:

    Created by CreateImage(i-1234567890abcdef0) for ami-0abcdef1234567890

  • If you no longer need the instances that were launched from the AMI, you can stop or terminate them. To list the instances, filter by the ID of the AMI.

Instance store-backed AMIs

  • Delete the bundle in Amazon S3 by using the ec2-delete-bundle (AMI tools) command.

  • If the Amazon S3 bucket is empty after you delete the bundle, and you have no further use for that bucket, you can delete the bucket.

  • If you no longer need the instances that were launched from the AMI, you can terminate them. To list the instances, filter by the ID of the AMI.