centos-7-ami

This documents the process of building an PV-GRUB AMI using in this case Centos 7.

However, the process should be repeatable for any kind of new distro that hasn't AMIs created yet.

TL;DR

The information and repos that I found all revolve around:

• creating a filesystem image file that is then blessed with ec2-bundle-image.

This did not work, because I could never get it to boot with the PV-GRUB AKI images. I am definitely doing something wrong, as all the scripts that I found do exactly this, but no combination of

• specifying block-device-mappings as ami=sda,root=/dev/sda, ami=/dev/sda,root=/dev/sda, etc
• using PV-GRUB 0 or 00 AKI images

worked

• creating a snapshot out of an existing HVM AMI. This did not work, because there were no existing AMIs :)

What did work is:

• Create a partitioned disk image, using MBR
• Install the necessary stuff there

Details

You need

• Access to AWS (keypairs, secret / access key)
• A centos 7 machine (Virtualbox, VMWare, bare metal, doesn't matter)
• An X.509 cert / private key

Creating a PV Raw image

• Login to a Centos 7 VM (Virtualbox, etc)
• Edit config_aws, config_pv_raw with the necessary parameters
• source {functions.sh,config_aws,config_pv_raw
• bash build-image.sh. Run the script. Very little testing was needed, so you might be better off copying the commands and checking for errors. Problematic steps are grub installation.

Creating a HVM Image

• First, create a PV image
• Boot an AWS machine with the PV image (don't know if necessary, but this is how I got it working)
• Login to the machine, checkout the code
• source {functions.sh,config_aws,config_hvm_mbr
• bash build-hvm-image-from-pv-image. Run the script. Very little testing was needed, so you might be better off copying the commands and checking for errors. Problematic steps are grub installation.

Inspiration / help

• Troubleshooting Instances AWS doc
• https://github.com/mkocher/ami_building
• https://github.com/BashtonLtd/centos-ami
• https://github.com/giabao/centos-ami
• https://github.com/SystemBelle/Build-AMI

TODO

• create GPT image, not MBR
• test HVM instances