Cost of storing AMI

Question

I understand Amazon will charge per GB provisioned EBS storage. If I create AMI of my instance, does this mean my EBS volume will be duplicated, and hence incur additional cost? Is there other cost charges in creating and storing an AMI (Amazon Machine Image)? Select the correct answer from above options

Answer 1

To put simply, you are not charged for creating AMIs but you will be charged for the storage it takes. So, when you create an AMI of an EC2 instance which is attached to an EBS volume, the AMI will be made up of snapshots of those EBS volumes. You have to only pay storage fees for those snapshots. S3-backed AMIs will store the data in S3 so you will pay the S3 storage fees. If you store in S3, you have to pay the recurring charges even if the instance is not running.