Specialized Amazon Windows AMIs - Amazon Windows AMIs
Find an Amazon Windows AMI
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).

Specialized Amazon Windows AMIs

In addition to its standard operating system version AMIs, Amazon creates the following types of specialized Amazon Windows AMIs:

SQL Server license-included AMIs

Launching an instance from a Windows AMI with Microsoft SQL Server enables you to run the instance as a database server. For more information, see Amazon Windows Server license-included SQL Server AMIs.

STIG Hardened AMIs

STIG Hardened EC2 Windows Server AMIs are pre-configured with over 160 required security settings to help ensure that the instances that you launch follow the latest guidelines for STIG compliance. For more information, see STIG Hardened Amazon Windows Server AMIs.

You can also create your own customized AMI from one of the Amazon Windows AMIs with EC2 Image Builder. For more information, see the EC2 Image Builder User Guide.

We recommend PowerShell for the command line examples in this section. To install PowerShell in your environment, see the Installation page in the Amazon Tools for PowerShell (version 4) User Guide.

Note

Not all AMIs are available in all Regions.

Find an Amazon Windows AMI

Each of the specialized AMI pages linked above has its own filtered search examples, as follows:

You can also search for the latest Windows AMIs that include the EC2Launch v2 agent, as shown in the following PowerShell example:

Get-SSMLatestEC2Image `
    -Path ami-windows-latest `
    -ImageName EC2LaunchV2-Windows* | `
Sort-Object Name
Note

If this command doesn't run in your environment, you might be missing a PowerShell module. For more information about this command, see Get-SSMLatestEC2Image Cmdlet.

Alternatively, you can use the CloudShell console and run pwsh to bring up a PowerShell prompt that already has all of the Amazon tools installed. For more information, see the Amazon CloudShell User Guide.

Find an Amazon Windows AMI in a specific language

The following language-specific Amazon Windows AMIs are included in the monthly release:

  • English

  • Japanese

  • Chinese

  • Korean

  • Czech

  • Dutch

  • French

  • German

  • Hungarian

  • Italian

  • Polish

  • Russian

  • Portuguese

  • Spanish

  • Swedish

  • Turkish

The following example uses PowerShell to search for the latest English language Amazon Windows AMIs:

Get-SSMLatestEC2Image `
    -Path ami-windows-latest `
    -ImageName *Windows_Server-*English* | `
Sort-Object Name
Note

If this command doesn't run in your environment, you might be missing a PowerShell module. For more information about this command, see Get-SSMLatestEC2Image Cmdlet.

Alternatively, you can use the CloudShell console and run pwsh to bring up a PowerShell prompt that already has all of the Amazon tools installed. For more information, see the Amazon CloudShell User Guide.