I need help duplicating Amazon AWS EC2 instances

Question

I\'m just getting started with AWS EC2 and not entirely sure I understand it.

From what I\'ve read, an instance is basically a virtual server, and you should be able to

Answer 1

Under instances, click on the image you want to duplicate and then go to instance action(its near the top) and create ami.

This creates a snapshot of your image as it is right now. Then when you need to add more power, you can simply launch that ami and have the load balancer distrubute the traffic between those ami's.

On a side note, unless really required, I would not suggest you store data on the ami if its changing and you plan to use it on another launched ami. You'll pretty much have to keep taking ami snapshots to update it with the new data, so instead figure a way to maintain state somewhere else(not sure about your data but you can consider a database, s3, or another server that these servers can mount to get the same data).

Hope that helps!