I recently needed to create a clean EC2 AMI using a fairly new linux distro. It has been a while since I’ve needed to create a new AMI so I also wanted to move away from the older pre-packaged AMI and boot using EBS. After taking a look at what was currently available publicly I decided I would just create my own EBS bootable AMI using Fedora 12. It wasn’t all that complicated but there are a decent number of steps so I figured I would document them for anyone else who might want to give it a try.
I’m going to assume you already understand how to do things like create instances, create EBS volumes and ssh into your running instance using key based authentication. I use the AWS management console for a lot of what follows with the exception of needing to register the AMI and for that you will need the Amazon EC2 API Tools and Amazon EC2 AMI Tools