I have worked with Oracle VM templates and most recently with Amazon Machine Images (AMI). The similarities in the functionality and capabilities they provide are striking. Just take a look a the definitions:

An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is a special type of pre-configured operating system and virtual application software which is used to create a virtual machine within the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). It serves as the basic unit of deployment for services delivered using EC2. AWS AMIs

Oracle VM Templates provide an innovative approach to deploying a fully configured software stack by offering pre-installed and pre-configured software images. Use of Oracle VM Templates eliminates the installation and configuration costs, and reduces the ongoing maintenance costs helping organizations achieve faster time to market and lower cost of operations. Oracle VM Templates

Other things they have in common:
1. Both have 35 Oracle images or templates:
AWS AMI pre-built images Oracle pre-built VM Templates
2. Both allow to build your own images or templates: A. OVM template builder - OVM Template Builder - Oracle VM Template Builder, an open source, graphical utility that makes it easy to use Oracle Enterprise Linux “Just enough OS” (JeOS)–based scripts for developing pre-packaged virtual machines for Oracle VM.
B. AMI 'builder' - AMI builder
However, AWS has the added feature/benefit of adding your own AMI to the AWS AMI catalog: AMI - Adding to the AWS AMI catalog

Another plus with AWS and AMI is there are hundreds of MySQL AMIs (AWS MySQL AMIs ). A benefit of Oracle VM templates is they can run on any public or private cloud environment, not just AWS EC2.
However, with Oracle VM templates they first need to be images as AMIs before they can run in the AWS cloud.