Amazon Cloud – Images

Recently I’ve started using Amazon Web Services for my hosting solution. One of the great benefits is having so much flexibility available with the servers your create. I wanted to share today how to create an image from a running server

I am using a Ubuntu as my flavor of Unix. I am going to assume you can use man and –help for more information and help.

You will need to install Amazon EC2 AMI Tools

uncomment multiverse repositories, update, and install


vi /etc/apt/sources.list
apt-get update
apt-get install ec2-ami-tools

create a cert and private key to encrypt your image!

I created two scripts one to bundle up my server, and the second one to upload it.


root@\server:~/AMI# cat createImage.csh  uploadBundle.csh
#!/bin/bash
ec2-bundle-vol -d /mnt -k Pk-file.pem -c cert-file.pem -u userid-number -r x86_64 -p tagname

#!/bin/bash
ec2-upload-bundle -b bucket-name -m /mnt/tagname.manifest.xml -a access-key -s access-pass

Now you can register your server AMI and Launch a new server the uploaded image

from the Amazon web panel, you can navigate to AMI’s, select register new AMI and input the manifest link. It would look something like this

AMI Manifest Path*:

http://s3.amazonaws.com:80/bucket-name/tagname.manifest.xml

This entry was posted in aws. Bookmark the permalink.

Comments are closed.