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

TODO

create GPT image, not MBR
test HVM instances