ruby on rails, jruby, aws, ec2, exalead

I’ve always enjoyed a kind of love/hate relationship with JavaScript, something which I think stems from my early exposure to using it on Microsoft platforms in the late 90’s, using half-baked debuggers, inconsistent browsers and a huge degree of trial and error. It’s not that I can’t write clever things in JavaScript, just that it’s not my most favourite job: if I can delegate to someone else I usually will!

Last week I was left with no choice but to roll up my sleeves and get coding: I was putting together a financial trading application prototype for one of our new clients and wanted to use JavaScript and JSON to periodically update pricing information.

I've used VMware for many years to allow me to test and develop various server configurations and distributions. It's where I played with Linux-VServer, User Mode Linux (UML), Kernel Based Virtual Machine (KVM) and Xen. The relevent part to EC2 here is obviously that EC2 is also Xen based.

So far when using EC2 I've stood on the shoulders of giants and taken existing AMIs and used them as they are or with modification. Always the control freak, I wanted to create my own AMI from scratch. Having slimmed down my hardware inventory (I got complaints about the various half built towers lying around!) then my only option was to either create an image in a loopback device on EC2 or return to my trusty steed of VMware.

Creating the AMI from VMware was easier than I thought - but just in case anyone else is looking to do it then I thought it worthy of a blog post.