AWS EC2 Instance Images/Backup Behaviour

Question

I'm still new to AWS and here is the scenario that I have currently:

1) I have one stand alone live windows server 2016 instance(production) with a static IP which is currently has a website deployed and the instance does not belong to a domain

2) I've created an Image(AMI) of the above instance as a back-up including attached volumes.

What would happen if I create a new instance from the Image(AMI) have both instances running? Would it affect the existing running instance?

How do I successfully bring up the backed-up Image in case of failure of the live instance?

Please let me know if I need to elaborate any other detail.

Thanks,

Answer 1

Question One: What would happen if I create a new instance from the Image(AMI) have both instances running? Would it affect the existing running instance?

You can bring up another instances based on the AMI and it will be independent from the other instance, at an infrastructure level. It's possible your application could do something unusual, but I doubt it. I believe this is safe, and I do it myself.

If you want to be very careful you could launch the new instance in another subnet, another VPC, or (with much more effort) in another account.

Question Two: How do I successfully bring up the backed-up Image in case of failure of the live instance?

You create a new instance based on the snapshot and transfer the elastic IP address over to the new instance.

Note that you will likely lose anything since your last snapshot. If things like logs are important to you they should be copied to CloudWatch Logs / S3 / somewhere else.