Using AMI aliases in AWS Marketplace - AWS Marketplace
Examples of using AMI aliases

Using AMI aliases in AWS Marketplace

An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is identified with an AMI ID. You can use the AMI ID to indicate which AMI you want to use when launching a product. The AMI ID has the form ami-<identifier>, for example, ami-123example456. Each version of each product in each AWS Region has a different AMI (and different AMI ID).

When you launch a product from AWS Marketplace, the AMI ID is automatically filled in for you. Having the AMI ID is useful if you want to automate launching products from the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) or by using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). You can find the AMI ID when you configure your software at launch time. For more information, see Step 3: Configuring your software.

The Ami Alias is also in the same location as the AMI ID, when configuring your software. The Ami Alias is a similar ID to the AMI ID, but it's easier to use in automation. An AMI alias has the form aws/service/marketplace/prod-<identifier>/<version> , for example, aws/service/marketplace/prod-1234example5678/12.2. You can use this Ami Alias Id in any Region, and AWS automatically maps it to the correct Regional AMI ID.

If you want to use the most recent version of a product, use the term latest in place of the version in the AMI alias so that AWS chooses the most recent version of the product for you, for example, aws/service/marketplace/prod-1234example5678/latest.

Warning

Using the latest option gives you the latest release of the software. However, use this feature with caution. For example, if a product has versions 1.x and 2.x available, you might be using 2.x. However, the most recently released version of the product might be a bug fix for 1.x.

Examples of using AMI aliases

AMI aliases are useful in automation. You can use them in the AWS CLI or in AWS CloudFormation templates.

The following example shows using an AMI alias to launch an instance by using the AWS CLI.

aws ec2 run-instances
--image-id resolve:ssm:/aws/service/marketplace/prod-<identifier>/version-7.1
--instance-type m5.xlarge
--key-name MyKeyPair

The following example shows a CloudFormation template that accepts the AMI alias as an input parameter to create an instance.

AWSTemplateFormatVersion: 2010-09-09

Parameters:
    AmiAlias:
        Description: AMI alias
        Type: 'String'
        
Resources:
    MyEC2Instance:
        Type: AWS::EC2::Instance
        Properties:
            ImageId: !Sub "resolve:ssm:${AmiAlias}"
            InstanceType: "g4dn.xlarge"
            Tags:
                -Key: "Created from"
                 Value: !Ref AmiAlias