Depending on your needs and usage, you will see if your current instance needs resizing or not. Sometimes, the instance may be too small. Like t1.micro was made to run on 600 MB RAM, but if you need something higher than that, you have to create a new instance, or simply upgrade it to a bigger one.
There are many ways to upgrade an Amimoto AMI instance. Amimoto has PVM and HVM instances, where all the new generation instances support HVM AMIs, but the earlier PVM instances do not support Linux HVM AMIs. Additionally, some of the new generation instances do not support PVM.
Prior to upgrading, determine your instance type first. Note that you may resize your instance to another instance type with the same virtualization method. As an example, t1.micro (smallest instance) is PVM, so you may upgrade it to something higher like m1.small which is also a PVM AMI. However, if you would like to migrate from PVM to HVM, view this article:
- Related article: How to Move Your Instance From PVM to HVM
Ways to Upgrade Amimoto Instances
1. At the AWS Management Console, go to EC2 Dashboard and choose the Amimoto instance you would like to upgrade.
Actions > Instance State > Stop.
This Amimoto Instance is t2.micro.
Once the instance has come to a full stop, change the instance type:
Choose from the dropdown menu and apply:
Though this is the simplest process to upgrade your Amimoto instance, it comes with a little bit of downtime. If downtime isn’t an issue, then this method is fair enough.
2. Although this next way to upgrade has more steps than the first one, it does not give you any downtime.
Actions > Create Snapshot or
Actions > Image > Create Image
Once this is completed, you can launch new instances. With this method, you don’t have to stop an instance, and your Amimoto instance will not be interrupted in running whatsoever. After your new instance is running, that’s the only time the server will be offline.
For a more detailed EBS Snapshot, view our post on “How to Create a Snapshot and Restore from it.”