Identify the root volume type determined by your AMI - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

Identify the root volume type determined by your AMI

The AMI that you use to launch an EC2 instance determines the type of the root volume. The root volume of an EC2 instance is either an EBS volume or an instance store volume.

Nitro-based instances support only EBS root volumes. The following previous generation instance types are the only instance types that support instance store root volumes: C1, C3, D2, I2, M1, M2, M3, R3, and X1.

Console
To identify the root volume type determined by an AMI

  1. Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.

  2. In the navigation pane, choose AMIs, and select the AMI.

  3. On the Details tab, check the value of Root device type as follows:

    • ebs – Instances launched from this AMI will get an EBS root volume

    • instance store – Instances launched from this AMI will get an instance store root volume.

AWS CLI
To identify the root volume type determined by an AMI

Use the describe-images command.

aws ec2 describe-images \
    --image-ids ami-0abcdef1234567890 \
    --query Images[].RootDeviceType

The following is example output.

ebs
PowerShell
To identify the root volume type determined by an AMI

Use the Get-EC2Image cmdlet.

(Get-EC2Image `
    -ImageId ami-0abcdef1234567890).RootDeviceType.Value

The following is example output.

ebs