Which is better EBS or private AMIs?

Question

I am new to Amazon web services. I need to create a server image with a few software packages pre installed on the EC2 instances. One option I am considering is to create an EBS volume with these packages and then use them to launch EC2 instances. The other option I am thinking of is to create a private AMI and then use them to launch the EC2 instances. I am not sure which option is better.

One other slightly related question I have is can I create a private EBS volume and share it with some other account.

Answer 1

You should create your own AMI, as it's probably more efficient. In order to create an instance, you must specify an AMI. Specifying an EBS snapshot as the root device in addition to specifying the AMI (if this even works, I haven't tested it) would just result in the EC2 cloud launching your instance with the AMI, followed by overwriting it with the EBS snapshot for the root volume.

It's easy enough to keep the AMIs laying around as prototypes.