Creating AMI takes so long

Question

I'm creating an AMI for a server with 100G files. It's been like an hour and it's still not finished. (The AMI still says pending) Is there something wrong with it? What should I do?

Answer 1

Just to let other people know, this process could take very, very long. My 100 GB AMI takes like 2.5 hours to create and the progress bar jumps from 0 to 100 directly after that. So don't worry.

Answer 2

This answer pertains to a retirement situation where there is potentially a hardware failure for an instance with a EBS root volume. In this situation, AWS recommends creating an AMI of the instance to be retired, and starting a new instance from this AMI. In my situation, the instance was not responding before starting the AMI creation process.

The AMI creation step failed to complete after >8 hours.

I next tried stopping the instance. This also failed to complete in >10 minutes, so I tried force stopping the instance (by issuing the stop command again). The force stop did complete after a few minutes. After the instance was stopped, the AMI creation succeeded in <10 minutes.

This AWS forum message seemed relevant to my case: https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?messageID=372982&#372982