Release: Amazon EC2 on 2013-03-11

This release of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) introduces support for copying an AMI from one AWS region to another and support for default virtual private clouds (VPC).

Release Date: March 11, 2013
Latest Version: 2013-02-01
Created On: March 11, 2013
Last Updated: October 09, 2017

New Features

Feature Description

Copying an AMI from one region to another

You can copy an AMI from one region to another, enabling you to launch consistent instances in more than one AWS region quickly and easily.

For more information, see Copying AMIs in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud User Guide.

Launching instances into a default VPC

Your AWS account is capable of launching instances into either the EC2-Classic or EC2-VPC platform, or only into the EC2-VPC platform, on a region-by-region basis. If you can launch instances only into EC2-VPC, we create a default VPC for you. When you launch an instance, we launch it into your default VPC, unless you create a nondefault VPC and specify it when you launch the instance.

For more information, see Supported Platforms in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud User Guide.

Version History

Release Date WDSL Description
2012-12-17 2012-12-01.ec2.wsdl Support for copying an Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) snapshot.
2012-11-01 2012-10-01.ec2.wsdl Support for up to 2,000 IOPS when you create a Provisioned IOPS volume.
2012-10-31 2012-10-01.ec2.wsdl Support for M3 instance types.
2012-10-14 2012-10-01.ec2.wsdl Support for Amazon EC2 Spot Instance Request Status.
2012-09-11 2012-07-20.ec2.wsdl Support for Reserved Instance Marketplace.
2012-07-31 2012-07-20.ec2.wsdl Support for Provisioned IOPS (input/output operations per second) volumes and the ability to launch selected Amazon EC2 instance types as EBS-Optimized instances.
2012-07-18 2012-06-15.ec2.wsdl Support for high I/O instances (hi1.4xlarge).
2012-07-11 2012-06-15.ec2.wsdl Support for multiple IP addresses for Amazon EC2 instances in Amazon VPC.
2012-06-11 2012-06-01.ec2.wsdl Support for launching an Amazon EC2 instance and associating an IAM role with the instance.
2012-06-07 2012-05-01.ec2.wsdl Support for new Spot Instance features that make it easier to get started and handle the potential of interruption. The new features include integration with Auto Scaling and AWS CloudFormation.
2012-05-25 2012-05-01.ec2.wsdl Support for exporting Windows Server instances.
2012-04-26 2012-04-01.ec2.wsdl Support for cc2.8xlarge instances in Amazon VPC.
2012-04-19 2012-04-01.ec2.wsdl Support for the AWS Marketplace.
2012-03-12 2012-03-01.ec2.wsdl Support for volume status and an API version: 2012-03-01.
2012-03-07 2011-12-15.ec2.wsdl Support for 64-bit option for all Amazon Machine Images, a new medium instance type, m1.medium and support for the MindTerm SSH client to allow customers to connect to their Linux instances through a web browser
2011-12-30 2011-12-15.ec2.wsdl Support for Reserved Instance Pricing Tiers and On-Demand price updates
2011-12-30 2011-12-15.ec2.wsdl Support for instance status checks and a new API version.
2011-12-01 2011-12-01.ec2.wsdl Support for New Elastic Network Interfaces (ENIs) for EC2 Instances in a VPCs.
2011-12-01 2011-11-01.ec2.wsdl Support for new choices of Reserved Instance offerings
2011-11-17 2011-11-01.ec2.wsdl Support for the DescribeInstanceStatus API
2011-10-11 2011-07-15.ec2.wsdl Support for EC2 Spot Instances in Amazon VPC
2011-09-15 2011-07-15.ec2.wsdl Support for EC2 VM Import CLI Updates
2011-08-24 2011-07-15.ec2.wsdl VM Import Support for Windows Server 2003 and VHD file format
2011-05-26 2011-05-15.ec2.wsdl Support for Amazon Spot Instances AZ Local Pricing Changes
2011-03-27 2011-02-28.ec2.wsdl Support for Dedicated Instances in a VPC
2011-03-15 2011-01-01.ec2.wsdl Support for Windows Server 2008 R2
2011-03-14 2011-01-01.ec2.wsdl Support for Amazon VPC Internet gateway and updated metadata
2010-12-16 2010-11-15.ec2.wsdl Support for Oracle enterprise applications on Amazon EC2
2010-12-15 2010-11-15.ec2.wsdl Support for VM Import
2010-12-02 2010-08-31.ec2.wsdl Support for Basic Monitoring for EC2 instances
2010-11-14 2010-08-31.ec2.wsdl Support for the new cluster GPU instance type (cg1.4xlarge)
2010-09-28 2010-08-31.ec2.wsdl Support for the AWS SDK for PHP
2010-09-19 2010-08-31.ec2.wsdl Support for tags, filters, idempotent RunInstance calls, and ImportKeyPair
2010-09-08 2010-06-15.ec2.wsdl Support for the new micro instance type
2010-09-02 2010-06-15.ec2.wsdl Support for AWS Identity and Access Management
2010-07-12 2010-06-15.ec2.wsdl Support for the new cluster compute instance type (cc1.4xlarge) and for specifying IP addresses in Amazon VPC
2010-06-14 2009-11-30.ec2.wsdl Support for Amazon CloudWatch monitoring for Amazon EBS volumes
2010-04-28 2009-11-30.ec2.wsdl Support for Asia Pacific (Singapore) Region
2010-03-22 2009-11-30.ec2.wsdl Support for the AWS SDK for Java
2010-02-22 2009-11-30.ec2.wsdl Support for the new High-Memory Extra Large instance type and for Reserved Instances with Windows
2009-12-14 2009-11-30.ec2.wsdl Support for Spot Instances

To view earlier Amazon EC2 release notes, see

Current Limitations for VM Import

The following are current limitations of VM Import:

  • The following types of images currently cannot be imported into Amazon EC2:
    • VMware Workstation VMDK images
    • Encrypted, compressed, or read-only images
    • Started or suspended images
    • Linked clones
    • Images with multiple virtual disks
  • When you import a disk image to an Amazon EC2 instance, the instance appears in the AWS Management Console before the conversion process finishes. To determine when the process is complete and the instance is available to use, use the ec2-describe-conversion-tasks command.

Current Limitations for M3 Standard Instances

The following are current limitations of m3.xlarge and m3.2xlarge instances:

  • All M3 standard instance types are only available in the US East (N. Virginia) Region.

Current Limitations for Cluster Instances

The following are current limitations of cluster compute and cluster GPU instances:

  • All cluster instance types are available in the US East (N. Virginia) and EU (Ireland) Regions. In addition, the cc2.8xlarge instance type is also available in the US West (Oregon) Region.
  • Amazon DevPay is not supported.

Current Limitations for Cluster Placement Groups

The following are current limitations of cluster placement groups:

  • Reserved Instances are not currently available within a cluster placement group

Current Limitations for Tags and Filters

You currently cannot tag the following resources:

  • Elastic IP addresses
  • Key pairs
  • Placement groups

You can currently filter your resources in the AWS Management Console by tag, but not by the other filters that are available to use with Describe* actions through the command line tools or API.

Current Limitations for Micro Instances

The following are current limitations of micro instances:

  • Amazon Virtual Private Cloud is not supported
  • Amazon Elastic MapReduce is not supported
  • Amazon DevPay is not supported

Setting the TCP_MAXSEG Socket Option

The 2.6.18-164.15.1 kernel used in the CentOS 5.4 reference AMI contains a known issue: Setting the TCP_MAXSEG socket option on TCP sockets to certain values (for example, 1500) causes the kernel to generate TCP Segmentation Offload (TSO) packets with invalid sizes that the NIC driver then drops. The impact is significantly lower network throughput. As a workaround, don't set this socket option and let the kernel use the default settings to handle segmentation and Path Maximum Transmission Unit (PMTU) discovery.

Query Version of ModifyInstanceAttribute

The ModifyInstanceAttribute action currently does not allow you to modify the block device mapping for the instance.

Paid AMIs Backed by Amazon EBS

Amazon EBS-backed AMIs are not currently supported by Amazon DevPay.

Windows AMI Launch Times

Windows AMIs take longer to launch than Linux/UNIX instances due to larger AMI sizes and multiple reboots.

Windows AMI Sizes

Installing software on Amazon S3-backed Windows AMIs can cause them to become large and easily reach the 10 GB limit. Before bundling, check the size of the C:\ volume.

Limitation on Drive Mapping

There are limitations on devices available for storage attachment. For more information, see Attaching the Volume to an Instance in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud User Guide.