this is the basic idea of how Azure does it as well.

Thanks for the insight Daniel

Uh, maybe you should read up on AMI's. The marketplace stores snapshots of AMI's...a complete backup of a runnable instance. When you launch an instance, it allocates EBS storage, provisions your memory and CPU space, and restores the AMI to the EBS drive, then powers up the instance. So yes, this is how it works, but it is not a mystery.

Hi @Jonathan - I am well aware how EBS instances work. The comment about the size of the Windows AMI's are still relevant - they are significantly larger than Others.

And even when that it is the case and an EBS volume is created from a snapshot - restoring 30GB takes longer than restoring 1-2GB.

When when we are talking about Instance store - then this is exactly the case.

Perhaps I was not clear enough about that in the statement above

I think you're spot on with this. If you've used AWS AppStream and had to compose a Fleet and manage it's scaling policies it'll look very familiar