Michael J Gorman

In preparation for a new for a new project I sat down tonight and prepared a new Amazon Ec2 AMI image setup for LAMP to demonstrate the setup to potential clients. Previously i had been using Rightscale with the NextAcropolis setup, so i hadn't actually sat down and crafted my own AMI image using the api tools provided by amazon.

If you're really focused on a setup with x, y, and b, on a specific flavor of linux you'll need to follow another set of steps to create images locally and so forth. The way i did it was to Star with an existing image. Those amazon documents take you through a basic setup of getting an image going using amazon's provided command line tools.

I discovered for myself that amazon has a beta product in the AWS account called AWS management center. It is a bit slow and clunky, but it allows you to bypass all the command line stuff on your own system.You do however still need to do the command line work to bundle the new AMI IN the existing AWS image you startup using the the management console. You can then use the guide to learn the command line tools on the instance you start, modify, and image.

After you modify the running instance to how you want it, you'll image it onto it self (i suggest using the /mnt directory to work in, as the ec2-bundle command will ignore that directory. No use in having an image containing your image, now is there? Once you image it you'll upload it to a bucket on your S3 account and register it either with the command line tools on your desktop, or using the AWS management console.