How to automatically create an image of an AWS ec2 instance AMI

Question

I am running an aws ec2 instance. I want to access it manually through aws console and create a daily image of the machine(AMI). Also I want to delete any image older than a week.

Answer 1

you should try using aws ec2 create-image, aws ec2 describe-images, and aws ec2 deregister-imageu ld together. other than that anything you can do on a web console can be done through cli too.

Answer 2

AWS lambda would be a right solution to automate the backup of your ami and clean up. You can schedule the lambda function (basically a python code) to run periodically. This way you don't need to have your ec2 running all the time.

Answer 3

You can use https://github.com/alestic/ec2-consistent-snapshot and run it in a cron job. It supports various filesystems and has support for ensuring database snapshots are consistent. If you don't have a database in your instance, it will still ensure consistent snapshots by freezing the filesystem.