JamesBranam's Blog
Tuesday Jun 02, 2009
AWS Experience Part 6: Creating a Custom AMI
Hi all,
Here is another installment on working in the cloud, the AWS cloud that is. Today's topic: creating a custom AMI. This may sound like as easy task. And it would have been, had AWS documentation been up to scratch. I spent lots of time messing around with this, and I finally got it to work. Here's how:
- Launch an exiting image (I chose a Fedora 8 image). Modify the /var/www/html/index.html file to something else (thus making it "your unique AMI). I went one step further: I installed JDK 6 and MySQL on mi AMI for use at a later date.
- Now you have to upload your private key and x509 certificate to the AMI. Here's how to do this in the terminal:
scp -i ~/.ssh/<yourkeypair.pem> ~/.ec2/<pk-whatever.pem> ~/.ec2/<cert-whatever.pem> root@your-public-DNS:/mnt.
The private key and x-509 certificate should be uploaded to themntdirectory to prevent them from being bundled with the new AMI. - When this has been done, log in to your AMI to check if it is there.
- While you're logged in to your virtual server, you can perform the next step of the process. (The reason I am even mentioning this is that AWS didn't mention it). Type the following command
ec2-bundle-vol -d /mnt -k /mnt/<personalkey.pem> -c /mnt/<cert.pem> -u <AWS-acct-no> -r i386 -p sampleimage
- Get a cup of coffee as this will take a while.
- Type the following to check if the AMI image is indeed there where it should be:
ls -l /mnt/sampleimage.*
- Upload your bundle to AWS S3 Storage. (Make sure that you sign up for S3 before you do this.) To do, type:
ec2-upload-bundle -b <S3-bucket-name> -m /mnt/sampleimage.manifest.xml -a <AWS-access-key-id> -s <AWS-secret-access-key> --location EU
Note: Remember to upload to an S3 bucket in correct region. Also: if the bucket does not exit, it will be created for you. (I've used a European bucket as an example.) - Now we get to register the AMI with AWS. Type the following:
ec2-register <bucket-name>/sampleimage.manifest.xml --region EU-WEST-1
AWS returns the new AMI ID (in my case ami-2faf875b). - Go to the AMIs panel of the your AWS Management Console and do a search for part of your AMI. It's there and ready for use! (You can see mine in the screenshot at the top of this blog entry.)
Cheers!
--James
Posted at 04:28PM Jun 02, 2009 by branajam in NetBeans | Comments[3]
Very helpful.
Step 9 is now completed by going to AMIs in the AWS control panel and adding the /bucketname/image.manifest.xml path at the end.
ec2-register was not available in the image that I fired up.
Also for those of you tearing their hair out over how to use S3 as I was, you need a third party tool as S3 offers nothing more than an API, so try s3browser.com.
cb
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Posted by Chris Bell on June 11, 2009 at 05:28 PM CEST #
Hi James,
This was just the information I was looking for... and just a bit late :)
I struggled with ubuntu's ec2-vmbuilder and with EU/US buckets and stuff like that.
This information is straight to the point and very useful.
One small question thought:
I noticed that after completing all steps, when launching a new instance, I can't choose the instance type (small/high-cpu/medium) anymore. Also in the ami browser no details (architecture/kernel/platform) show up. Do you know of a way to fix this? Since I'm basing my AMI off an AMI that did support instance-type selection and did not change the kernel or ramdisk, I think it's strange this feature disappears by just cloning. perhaps I need to add some stuff to the manifest?
Posted by Mathijs Kwik on June 24, 2009 at 02:20 AM CEST #
Hi Mathijs,
I tried to recreate this with one of my custom AMIs, but couldn't. The only thing I can think of that might affect this parameter is that AWS has set limits for certain platforms, etc. I promise to look into this. If you can, please send me an update on your progress. Maybe we can solve the problem together.
--James
Posted by James on June 24, 2009 at 04:09 PM CEST #