[CentOS] Amazon EC2 - building a minimal centOS ebs bootable image

Sat Jan 29 15:32:55 UTC 2011
Sanjay Arora <sanjay.k.arora at gmail.com>

On Sat, Jan 29, 2011 at 7:46 PM, Rainer Traut <tr.ml at gmx.de> wrote:
>
> To get an image into the cloud I did:
> - format a 10GiB file with ext3
> - install a minimal centos to it (yum with --installroot option)
> - put this into S3 as an AMI
> - start an instance of it
> - clone this to an EBS file with rsync
> - make a snapshot of this EBS
> - convert this snapshot to an EBS AMI
> - use your EBS instances...
>
Looking exactly for something like this...but more detailed. I have
slow dsl...so I would rather use somebody else's centos image to build
my own.

Have found many howtos but all seem to be for just for copying some
other ami and then reconfiguring it, or else they are too technical
for me to dive into.

Found one link http://jeevanullas.in/blog/2010/08/using-boxgrinder-to-build-your-own-ami-for-ec2/
which comes nearest to what I want, using a tool called boxgrinder.
I'd rather not handcode because I don't really understand the syntax
of initrd or grub...I'm more of a user and usually have a
tutorial/detailed howto that I follow.

Can anyone tell me about more tools or scripts, that can help automate
doing the steps required to build an ec2 ebs bootable instance....or a
howto for a dummy.....though I am googling each of Rainer's steps to
see if I can get better information individually than I could get on
the subject as a single detailed howto.

BTW, should't 2-3 gb be enough for a base minimal install as data
would/should go into a separate ebs volume?