How to identify EBS backed VS instance backed root device

The EC2 console makes it very painful to know if an instance is EBS-backed or instance-backed.

We will use the command ec2-describe-images to check if the root device is EBS-backed after we launch an instance.


Steps:

Log in to your AWS console.

Launch an instance with your desired image (I like the Ubuntu Server 12.04.1 LTS 64-bit; it's AMI id is ami-3d4ff254 and it's EBS-backed).

At the AWS EC2 console, find the AMI ID of the instance you just launched (should be the third column in the table).

ssh into your instance.

Run ec2-describe-images (See Installing the Amazon EC2 API Tools).

> ec2-describe-images ami-3d4ff254 -H

Type ImageID Name Owner State Accessibility ProductCodes Architecture ImageType KernelId RamdiskId Platform RootDeviceType VirtualizationType Hypervisor
IMAGE ami-a29943cb 099720109477/ubuntu/images/ebs/ubuntu-precise-12.04-amd64-server-20120424 099720109477 available public x86_64 machine aki-825ea7eb ebs paravirtual xen

The highlighted text shows the root device type.

Note that EBS-backed instance does NOT mean EBS-optimized instance. (An EBS-Optimized instance is provisioned with dedicated throughput to EBS. The m1.large, m1.xlarge, and m2.4xlarge instance types are currently available as EBS-Optimized instances.)

If there is an easier way that you can identify EBS-backed images in the UI console, please post below.