Announcing ami-creator
I’ve been having to build some new CentOS images to be used with EC2 for work recently. I went into it thinking that it shouldn’t be too big of a deal. I know that some work had been going on in this area and Fedora 14 is now available on EC2, so I figured I could convince the same toolchain to work.
Unfortunately, I was pretty disappointed with my options.
- Do some building by hand on an actual instance, then do the bundling and upload off of the running instance.
- Some of the ThinCrust stuff initially looked promising, but it seems like it’s largely unmaintained these days and the ec2 conversion bits didn’t really work at this point. I was able to get my initial images this way, but mostly by having a wrapper shell script of doom that made me sad.
- There’s always the rPath tools, but I wanted to stick to something more native and fully open source
- The new kid on the block is apparently BoxGrinder but I found it to be a lot over-complicated and not that robust. I’m sorry, but generating your own format that you then transform into a kickstart config and even run through appliance-creator via exec from your ruby tool just felt wrong. No offense, but just felt like a lot more than I wanted to deal with
So, I sat down and spent an evening hacking and have the beginnings of a working ami-creator.
It’s pretty straight-forward and uses all of the python-imgcreate stuff that’s used to build Fedora live images. Your input is a kickstart config and out the other side pops an image that you can bundle and upload to EC2.
Thus far, I’ve tested it to build CentOS 5 and Fedora 14 images. I’m sure there are some bugs but at this point, it’s worth getting it out for more people to play with. Hopefully it’s something that’s a lot simpler and more accessible for people to build images and I think it will also fit in a lot better with having Fedora release engineering building the EC2 images in Fedora 15 if they want.
One of the big outstanding pieces that I still want to add is the necessary bits to be able to (optionally) go ahead and upload and register as an AMI with your EC2 account. But release early, release often.
Comments, etc appreciated in all the normal ways.
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