Why does the custom Amazon EC2 AMI have limited instance type options

amazon ec2

The Basic 64-bit Amazon Linux AMI has the following instance type options available:

  • Micro
  • Large
  • Extra-Large
  • High-Memory Extra Large

… etc

I booted up this AMI as a micro type, made customizations, shut it down, detached the volume, took a snapshot, and registered my own custom AMI:
ec2-register –snapshot [snapshot_id] –description "my description" –name "my name" –kernel aki-427d952b

That worked. HOWEVER, when I try to create an instance from my custom AMI, only the following instance types are available:

  • Micro
  • Small
  • High-CPU Medium

… which coincidentally are the same instance types available if you try to boot up the 32-bit Amazon image.

Why are the available instance types of my custom image varying from the available instance types of the image I based it off of?

Best Answer

When you register the image, make sure to include an explicit

-a x86_64

Without this, you let the Black Box of Amazon's back end decide which architecture to use. Apparently it defaults to 32bit, or guessed wrong in your case.

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