Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

Amazon Windows AMIs

Amazon provides a set of publicly available AMIs that contain software configurations specific to the Windows platform. You can quickly start building and deploying your applications with Amazon EC2 by using these AMIs. First choose the AMI that meets your specific requirements, and then launch an instance using that AMI. You retrieve the password for the administrator account and then log in to the instance using Remote Desktop Connection, just as you would with any other Windows server.

When you launch an instance from a Windows AMI, the root device for the Windows instance is an Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume. Windows AMIs do not support instance store for the root device.

Windows AMIs that have been configured for faster launching are pre-provisioned, using snapshots to launch instances up to 65% faster. To learn more about faster launching for Windows AMIs, including how you can configure faster launching for your Windows AMI, see Configure Windows fast launch for your Windows Server AMI.

Some Windows AMIs include an edition of Microsoft SQL Server (SQL Enterprise Edition, SQL Server Standard, SQL Server Express, or SQL Server Web). Launching an instance from a Windows AMI with Microsoft SQL Server enables you to run the instance as a database server. Alternatively, you can launch an instance from any Windows AMI and then install the database software that you need on the instance.

Select an initial Windows AMI

To view the Windows AMIs provided by Amazon, you can use the Amazon EC2 console or Amazon Web Services Marketplace. For more information, see Find a Windows AMI.

You can also create an AMI from software running on your own Windows computer. For more information, see the following services:

Keep your AMIs up to date

Use the Amazon Systems Manager Automation runbook AWS-UpdateWindowsAmi to update an AMI by installing Windows updates, Amazon software, and Amazon drivers. You can also use EC2 Image Builder, a fully managed Amazon service, to help automate creating up-to-date AMIs. For more information, see the EC2 Image Builder User Guide.

For EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group, you can create and use the PatchAMIAndUpdateASG runbook to update an Auto Scaling group with a newly patched AMI. For more information, see Updating AMIs for Auto Scaling groups in the Amazon Systems Manager User Guide.

For existing EC2 instances, we recommend that you regularly patch, update, and secure the operating system and applications. For more information, see Update your Windows instance.

Virtualization types

AMIs use one of two types of virtualization: paravirtual (PV) or hardware virtual machine (HVM). The main differences between PV and HVM AMIs are the way in which they boot and whether they can take advantage of special hardware extensions for better performance. Windows AMIs are HVM AMIs.

HVM AMIs are presented with a fully virtualized set of hardware and boot by executing the master boot record of the root block device of your image. This virtualization type provides the ability to run an operating system directly on top of a virtual machine without any modification, as if it were run on the bare-metal hardware. The Amazon EC2 host system emulates some or all of the underlying hardware that is presented to the guest.

HVM guests can take advantage of hardware extensions that provide fast access to the underlying hardware on the host system. HVM AMIs are required to take advantage of enhanced networking and GPU processing. In order to pass through instructions to specialized network and GPU devices, the OS needs to be able to have access to the native hardware platform; HVM virtualization provides this access.

Paravirtual guests traditionally performed better with storage and network operations than HVM guests because they could leverage special drivers for I/O that avoided the overhead of emulating network and disk hardware, whereas HVM guests had to translate these instructions to emulated hardware. Now PV drivers are available for HVM guests, so Windows instances can get performance advantages in storage and network I/O by using them. With these PV on HVM drivers, HVM guests can get the same performance as paravirtual guests, or better.