uk ruby on rails, exalead, aws, consultancy

A quick set of notes on how to create a bootable EBS snapshot from a running EC2 instance - for example, an instance that has been started from an S3 backed AMI.

We've had to do this a few times over the last few months - for the benefit of others, we've outlined how we currently do it - this is based on a number of articles that were surfacing at the time of our research, but I don't have the links to hand. If there's a better way out there feel free to jump in!

Update: Amazon have now added a VM Import feature that takes care of converting VMWare VMDK images into EC2 AMIs - check it out as it may work for you!

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.