Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) are used to create Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances in your Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment. You can create AMIs in a separate, centralized AWS account, which is called a creator account in this pattern. You can then share the AMI across multiple AWS accounts that are in the same AWS Region, which are called consumer accounts in this pattern. Managing AMIs from a single account provides scalability and simplifies governance. In the consumer accounts, you can reference the shared AMI in Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling launch templates and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) node groups.