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I'm creating an AMI for a server with 100G files. It's been like an hour and it's still not finished. (The AMI still says pending) Is there something wrong with it? What should I do?

jackhao
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    As a point of comparison, I've had AMIs in the 100GB range take an hour or so to create. There's nothing unusual about your situation. (edit: you also want to hit the refresh from time-to-time...) – jpoveda Oct 11 '13 at 22:39
  • In my experience, the AMI doesn't show pending, or show up at all. When it's ready it appears after a refresh. Sometimes it never shows up and I try again the next day. It's really very exceptionally terrible. – Bruno Bronosky Jul 12 '17 at 18:00
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    Even now in 2018 a 100GB AMI takes over an hour to complete. Interestingly, a 30GB AMI takes only ~5 minutes usually, so the time taken seems to increase exponentially with size. – Steve Horvath Jun 22 '18 at 00:14
  • Related: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/56971950/how-to-speed-up-creation-of-ami-amazon-machine-image – stevec Jan 14 '20 at 23:44

3 Answers3

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Just to let other people know, this process could take very, very long. My 100 GB AMI takes like 2.5 hours to create and the progress bar jumps from 0 to 100 directly after that. So don't worry.

vvvvv
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jackhao
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This answer pertains to a retirement situation where there is potentially a hardware failure for an instance with a EBS root volume. In this situation, AWS recommends creating an AMI of the instance to be retired, and starting a new instance from this AMI. In my situation, the instance was not responding before starting the AMI creation process.

The AMI creation step failed to complete after >8 hours.

I next tried stopping the instance. This also failed to complete in >10 minutes, so I tried force stopping the instance (by issuing the stop command again). The force stop did complete after a few minutes. After the instance was stopped, the AMI creation succeeded in <10 minutes.

This AWS forum message seemed relevant to my case: https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?messageID=372982&#372982

mattm
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  • Hmm, so it seems like stop and starting or retirement of the instance won't actually wipe out the Wordpress installation? (if that was what the instance is running for) – Brady Dowling Jan 30 '19 at 20:38
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It fully depends on the disk size that is attached to the es2 instance.

But one can check the progress of the AMI backup job by checking the EBS snapshot, as it will also take a snapshot of the attached EBS. Once taking a snapshot is completed, it will show Available(100%), before that it will show Unavailable(X%). Once it's become Available(100%), AMI backup will complete.

Here are some image of the snapshot progress.

Snapshot progress

Sunny Adhya
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