Posted On: Nov 7, 2023
Today, AWS announces the ability for customers to enable Windows Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) to launch faster when the images are shared with them from another account. Prior to this, faster launching for Windows AMIs could only be enabled by the AMI owner, but now the recipient of the shared AMI can enable it as well and customize the parameters based on their need with a few simple actions.
To get started, you can configure faster launching for EC2 Windows AMIs from the AMI Management section of the Amazon EC2 Console, from the distribution settings in Amazon Image Builder console or via API/CLI commands. There is no additional service charge for enabling faster launching in your AMI. The underlying resources consumed for faster launching are largely the same as what are used in a standard launch other than storing the image snapshot used to launch faster.
Learn more from the Amazon EC2 Windows documentation section about configuring Microsoft Windows AMIs for faster launching. For more details on getting the best out of Amazon EC2 instances running Microsoft Windows Server OS check out the Windows on AWS page and the guide on AWS Windows AMIs. Faster Windows launching for EC2 is available in all commercial AWS, China, and the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.