Posted On: May 1, 2024

Starting today, you can prevent Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) from accidental deregistration by marking them as protected. A protected AMI cannot be deregistered until you explicitly disable deregistration protection.

Prior to today, you could recover accidentally deregistered AMIs by onboarding onto Recycle Bin. However, if the AMIs were actively being used to launch instances, unintentional deregistrations could lead to production outages until you recovered those AMIs from Recycle Bin. Now by marking your critical AMIs as protected, you can proactively safeguard your AWS environments against accidental AMI deregistrations. To further safeguard your environments, you can optionally enable a 24-hour cooldown period during which a protected AMI can’t be deregistered even after you disable protection.

AMI deregistration protection is now available in all AWS Regions, including the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions and AWS China Regions, and can be enabled through EC2 Console, CLI, and APIs. To learn more, please visit documentation here.