Foundation AMIs for Aminator

Answers for AWS maintains a set of Foundation AMIs for use with Aminator and the Ansible Provisioner.

List of Foundation AMIs

Region	Region Name	AMI	Snapshot
ap-northeast-1	Tokyo	ami-bb72e2ba	snap-00000000
ap-southeast-1	Singapore	ami-62a6ee30	snap-00000000
ap-southeast-2	Sydney	ami-0974e633	snap-00000000
eu-west-1	Ireland	ami-d30119a7	snap-00000000
sa-east-1	São Paulo	ami-3d70d420	snap-00000000
us-east-1	N. Virginia	ami-6637760f	snap-00000000
us-west-1	N. California	ami-eab59eaf	snap-00000000
us-west-2	Oregon	ami-2cac311c	snap-4ae7f470

Details

The Foundation AMI is just the latest LTS release from Ubuntu, running on XFS (rather than ext3 or ext4) with Git and Ansible installed. Nothing more.

The basis for these AMIs are the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 'precise' Cloud Images. The images are all 64-bit and EBS backed.

Create your own Foundation AMI

You can easily create your own Foundation AMI by using the scripts provided here, or modifying them to your needs. There is also a CloudFormation Template called foundation-ami-maker.json that does all of the heavy lifting for you. The basic flow is:

1. Bring up an EC2 instance using the CloudFormation script provided

$ aws cloudformation create-stack
--stack-name Foundation-maker
--template-url http://answers4aws.s3.amazonaws.com/foundation-ami-maker.json
--parameters ParameterKey=InstanceType,ParameterValue=t1.micro,ParameterKey=KeyName,ParameterValue=mykey

This script creates an IAM Role with the necessary permissions needed for AMI making.

__NOTE:__ Change _mykey_ to be your KeyPair

1. Poll the CloudFormation stack progress until you see the 3 steps in the output. It will look something like this:

``` bash
$ aws cloudformation describe-stacks
...
         "Outputs": [
             {
                 "Description": "Step 1: SSH to this instance using your KeyPair",
                 "OutputKey": "step001",
                 "OutputValue": "ssh -i mykey.pem ubuntu@ec2-12-12-12-12.compute.amazonaws.com"
             },
             {
                 "Description": "Step 2: Create a Foundation EBS volume",
                 "OutputKey": "step002",
                 "OutputValue": "./foundation-create-volume"
             },
             {
                 "Description": "Step 3: Create your Foundation AMI from the Foundation EBS volume",
                 "OutputKey": "step003",
                 "OutputValue": "./foundation-create-ami"
             }
         ],
         "StackName": "Foundation-maker",
         "StackStatus": "CREATE_COMPLETE",

1. Then just follow the steps: 1) SSH into the instance, 2) Create the EBS Volume, 3) Create the Foundation AMI from the volume.

Once you are done, you can delete the CloudFormation stack. The entire process is complete in under 30 minutes.