Cancel having an AMI shared with your AWS account

An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) can be shared with specific AWS accounts by adding the accounts to the AMI's launch permissions. If an AMI has been shared with your AWS account and you no longer want it shared with your account, you can remove your account from the AMI's launch permissions. You do this by running the cancel-image-launch-permission AWS CLI command. When running this command, your AWS account is removed from the launch permissions for the specified AMI.

You might cancel having an AMI shared with your account, for example, to reduce the likelihood of launching an instance with an unused or deprecated AMI that was shared with you. When you cancel having an AMI shared with your account, it no longer appears in any AMI lists in the EC2 console or in the output for describe-images.

Limitations

• You can remove your account from the launch permissions of an AMI that is shared with your AWS account only. You can't use cancel-image-launch-permission to remove your account from the launch permissions of an AMI shared with an organization or organizational unit (OU) or to remove access to public AMIs.

• You can’t permanently remove your account from the launch permissions of an AMI. An AMI owner can share an AMI with your account again.

• AMIs are a Regional resource. When running cancel-image-launch-permission, you must specify the Region in which the AMI is located. Either specify the Region in the command, or use the AWS_DEFAULT_REGION environment variable.

• Only the AWS CLI and SDKs support removing your account from the launch permissions of an AMI. The EC2 console does not currently support this action.

Cancel having an AMI shared with your account

Note

After you cancel having an AMI shared with your account, you can't undo it. To regain access to the AMI, the AMI owner must share it with your account.

AWS CLI

To cancel having an AMI shared with your AWS account

Use the cancel-image-launch-permission command and specify the AMI ID.

aws ec2 cancel-image-launch-permission \
    --image-id ami-0123456789example \
    --region us-east-1

Expected output

{
    "Return": true
}

PowerShell

To cancel having an AMI shared with your AWS account using the AWS Tools for PowerShell

Use the Stop-EC2ImageLaunchPermission command and specify the AMI ID.

Stop-EC2ImageLaunchPermission `
    -ImageId ami-0123456789example `
    -Region us-east-1

Expected output

True

Find AMIs that are shared with your account

To find the AMIs that are shared with your AWS account, see Find shared AMIs.