We're going to be constructing our instance's AMIs by "layering" them and this is done baking one on top of the other. The bottom layer for us is the operating system directly from the vendor. In this case Ubuntu Trusty from Canonical. The baking process uses snapshots. As Canonical doesn't provide public snapshots of Ubuntu, we're going to create our own out of the jumphost we created in Step 4. In this case, we are going to create an image from a running instance. An alternative, and how we do it at Netflix, is to take the public AMI from Canonical and dd to volume which can snapshot. This gives a snapshot that was never previously started, i.e. there are no remants of previous runs like logs files or lock files.
- View Instances page. Which can also be accessed from the Services | EC2 | Instances.
- With your instance selected in Step 4, pull down from the "Actions" menu bar and select “Create Image”.
- In the dialog that comes up, Give it an "Image Name" of “ubuntu-foundation” and keep the defaults for the rest of the fields.
- Click "Create Image".
- On following dialog, you can just "Close" it.
