An AMI is an image of the filesystem for your boot volume. A base AMI contains an operating system. However, you can launch AMIs that have applications already installed and pre-configured.
These are available from the AWS marketplace or the AWS community, or you can launch custom AMIs that you configure for yourself.
When you click on Quick Start, you will get the following screen:
You can select the Free tier only checkbox to filter the available AMIs.
These include Linux varieties such as Red Hat, Ubuntu, SUSE, and Amazon's own Linux variety, which is optimized to the AWS environment and most closely resembles Red Hat. You can also select the Windows Server operating system, some with SQL Server already installed.
Note
If you choose one of these, or Linux varieties such as Red Hat which have a software license fee, the licensing will be added to the hourly charge for the instance.
When selecting an AMI, some of the features to note are the architecture, 32- or 64-bit, the root...