Delete the Amazon Machine Image (AMI) and its associated snapshots

Whenever you create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) out of an EC2 instance with multiple EBS volumes, it takes a snapshot of every volume attached to this EC2 instance, if specified. So when you decide to delete this image, it won't automatically remove the corresponding snapshots. In this guide, you will learn how to remove all AMI snapshots on the AWS Console with the AWS CLI plus bash and with PowerShell.

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Mohamed Wali

Mohamed is a cloud infrastructure expert with experience in engineering and implementation in AWS and Azure. He currently works as a Cloud Infrastructure Architect at Amazon Web Services.

Delete the AMI and its associated snapshots using the AWS Console

Navigate to the EC2 Console. On the left menu, choose Images > AMIs.

AMIs in the EC2 Console

Select the AMI you want to remove, and click Actions.

Choose Deregister, then click Continue.

Deregister AMI

Note: Before you deregister the AMI, make sure you've copied its ID.

On the left menu, choose Elastic Block Store > Snapshots.

On the Snapshots search bar, search for the AMI ID you deregistered earlier. The snapshots are filtered, so that only the ones associated with this AMI are displayed.

AMI associated snapshots

Select the snapshots, click Actions, and choose Delete.

Note: If you tried to remove a root volume snapshot associated with an AMI before deregistering the AMI, you will get an error message that the snapshot is currently in use by an AMI.

Snapshot is currently in use by AMI

Delete the AMI and its associated snapshots using bash and the AWS CLI

First, you need to retrieve the snapshots associated with the AMI using the following command:

Snapshots="$(aws ec2 describe-images --image-ids <Pass the image ID here> --region <Pass the region in which this AMI is located> --query 'Images[*].BlockDeviceMappings[*].Ebs.SnapshotId' --output text)"

Afterward, you can deregister the AMI using the following command:

aws ec2 deregister-image --image-id <Pass the image ID here>

Finally, you can remove all the snapshots associated with that AMI by running the following command:

for SNAPSHOT in $Snapshots ; do aws ec2 delete-snapshot --snapshot-id $SNAPSHOT; done

Delete the AMI and its associated snapshots using PowerShell

First, you need to retrieve the AMI and store it in a variable using the following cmdlet:

$ami = Get-EC2Image -ImageId <Pass the image ID here>

Then, you need to retrieve the snapshot IDs associated with this AMI and store them in an array using the following cmdlet:

$Snapshots = @($ami.BlockDeviceMapping.ebs.snapshotid)

Afterward, you can deregister the AMI using the following cmdlet:

Unregister-EC2Image -ImageId $ami.ImageId

Finally, you can remove all the snapshots associated with that AMI by running the following piece of code:

foreach ($Snapshot in $Snapshots) {
Remove-EC2Snapshot $Snapshot
}

Conclusion

In this article, we've gone through a step-by-step guide about how to delete an AMI and its associated snapshots. If you've got any further questions, please mention them in the comments.