Amazon EC2 now provides lineage information for your AMIs

Amazon EC2 now provides source details for your Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). With this lineage information, you can easily trace any copied or derived AMI back to their original AMI source.

Prior to today, you had to maintain a list of AMIs, use tags, and create custom scripts to track the origins of an AMI. This approach was time-consuming, hard to scale, and resulted in operational overheads. Now with this capability, you can easily view details of the source AMI, making it easier for you to understand from where a particular AMI originated. When copying AMIs across AWS Regions, the lineage information clearly links the copied AMIs to their original AMIs. This new capability provides a more streamlined and efficient way to manage and understand the lineage of AMIs within your AWS environment

You can view these details by using the AWS CLI, SDKs, or Console. This capability is available at no additional cost in all AWS Regions, including AWS GovCloud (US) and AWS China Regions. To learn more, please visit our documentation here.