Good evening, all. I just tried spinning up a CentOS instance in EC2 using ami-de5bd2ee from the AWS marketplace. I put a dummy script into the user-data field when launching the instance from the EC2 console but found it didn't work, even though the SSH key for the root user did. I pinged Karanbir on ##aws and he suggested I post here to get the conversation started.
I'm currently looking into what it takes to roll my own AMI; I've already invested a fair bit of work into creating packages and Puppet config based on a CentOS 6.3 system (mainly with Vagrant), and my initial test with Amazon's Linux AMI wasn't promising. I think execution of the user-data script is a must-have, as it's the only way to automate the creation of a new instance without external tools.
Thanks,
Brian