There are still a few important pieces that I would really recommend you try after you have created your AMI. First up, try and launch a new instance from it. Once the instance is launched, go ahead and check whether your instance has the correct root partition name and size as allocated or not. Next up, try and copy your AMI to a different region. You can refer to http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/CopyingAMIs.html for the required steps. Copying an AMI from one region to another is just a simple way to build scalable and highly available applications. You can try the same with your EBS volume as well. Go ahead and take a snapshot of any volume of your choice and copy it over to some other AWS region and attach it to a running instance.

Besides these steps, there is some additional EBS Volume related information that I would really recommend you guys read. First up is something called EBS-optimized instances. These are specially created instances that provided dedicated throughput and IOPS for performance-intensive applications. This is an add-on feature provided by AWS and is charged separately on an hourly basis. To know more about EBS-Optimized Instances, go to http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/EBSOptimized.html.

Secondly, I would recommend reading the EBS Performance tips that are provided by AWS. These tips will help you analyze and benchmark your volumes for I/O performance-intensive applications, configure RAID on your Linux instances, and help you learn how to prewarm your EBS Volumes. These are all additional tips and practices that you can choose to leverage in case you are working with production environments and high-performance-intensive applications.

Another very interesting thing worth mentioning is public datasets. These are basically really large repositories of publically available datasets such as the US census data, transportation statistics, human genomic data, and so on. The whole idea here is that AWS hosts these and provides these datasets for use completely free of charge, so you don't spend hours of your time locating and downloading them. Simply create a volume from any one of these public datasets which are in the form of public snapshots and start analyzing them. Awesome, isn't it! You can read more about public datasets at http://aws.amazon.com/public-data-sets/.