There are several techniques for creating an AMI offering a mix of ease of use and detailed customization levels. The easiest method involves starting from an existing public AMI and modifying it according to your requirements, as described in the section called “Starting with an Existing AMI”.
Another approach is to build a fresh installation either on a stand-alone machine or on an empty file system mounted by loopback. This essentially entails building an operating system installation from scratch and is described in the section called “Creating via a Loopback File”.
Once the installation package has been built to your satisfaction it needs to be bundled and uploaded to Amazon S3 as described in the section called “Bundling an AMI”.
This is the quickest and easiest of the methods to get a new working AMI. Start with an existing public AMI or one of your own. You can then modify that as you see fit and subsequently create a new AMI with the ec2-bundle-vol utility, as decribed later in the section called “Bundling an AMI”.
You are now ready to launch an instance of the AMI you selected above.
PROMPT>ec2-run-instancesami-5bae4b32-kgsg-keypairINSTANCE i-10a64379 ami-5bae4b32 EC2 pending gsg-keypair 0
The instance ID in the second field of the output is a unique identifier for the instance and can be used subsequently to manipulate your instance, e.g. to terminate it.
![[Important]](important.png)
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Important |
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Once you launch an instance, you will be billed per hour for CPU time. Make sure you terminate any instances which you don't intend to leave running indefinitely. |
It will take a few minutes for the instance to launch. You can follow its progress by running:
PROMPT>ec2-describe-instancesi-10a64379RESERVATION r-fea54097 495219933132 EC2 INSTANCE i-10a64379 ami-5bae4b32 domU-12-34-31-00-00-05.usma1.compute.amazonaws.com EC2 running gsg-keypair 0
When the status field reads "running", the instance has been created and has started booting. There may still be a short time before it is accessible over the network, however. The DNS name displayed in the sample output above will be different from that assigned to your instance. Make sure you use the appropriate one.
The new AMI will be encrypted and signed to ensure that it can only be accessed by you and Amazon EC2. You therefore need to upload your Amazon EC2 private key and X.509 certificate to the running instance, for use in the AMI bundling process.
Assuming the private key and X.509 certificate are contained in files
pk-HKZYKTAIG2ECMXYIBH3HXV4ZBZQ55CLO.pem and
cert-HKZYKTAIG2ECMXYIBH3HXV4ZBZQ55CLO.pem, copy both of these files to your instance:
PROMPT>scppk-HKZYKTAIG2ECMXYIBH3HXV4ZBZQ55CLO.pemcert-HKZYKTAIG2ECMXYIBH3HXV4ZBZQ55CLO.pemroot@domU-12-34-31-00-00-05.usma1.compute.amazonaws.com:/tmppk-HKZYKTAIG2ECMXYIBH3HXV4ZBZQ55CLO.pem 100% 717 0.7KB/s 00:00 cert-HKZYKTAIG2ECMXYIBH3HXV4ZBZQ55CLO.pem 100% 685 0.7KB/s 00:00
![[Note]](note.png)
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Note |
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It is important that the key and cert files are uploaded into /tmp to prevent them being bundled with the new AMI. |
You are now ready to proceed to the next step which involves bundling the volume and uploading the resulting AMI to Amazon S3. This is described in the section called “Bundling an AMI”.
The base operating system has now successfully been installed. You must now configure the networking and hard drives to work in the Amazon EC2 environment.
The Amazon EC2 environment provides a networking interface card
that needs to be configured to provide external network access
for the running instance. Edit (or create) the following file
/mnt/ec2-fs/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0,
making sure it contains at least the following information.
DEVICE=eth0 BOOTPROTO=dhcp ONBOOT=yes TYPE=Ethernet USERCTL=yes PEERDNS=yes IPV6INIT=no
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The Amazon EC2 DHCP server ignores hostname requests. If you
set |