Creating an EC2 Amazon Machine Image (AMI)

Part of the OmniOS distribution media is a set of disk images in various formats which are suitable for using in a cloud environment such as AWS EC2.

These cloud images are available on our downloads page.

Converting these images into an AMI ready to run is fairly straightforward:

1. Upload the image to an S3 bucket;
2. Import the image into an Elastic Block Store (EBS) snapshot;
3. Create an AMI from the snapshot;
4. Clean up the S3 bucket.

Setting up the AWS cli

If you’re doing this on OmniOS, then the easiest way to set up the AWS command line interface is through a Python virtual environment (venv). This example uses an environment called awscli.

$ python3 -mvenv awscli
$ . awscli/bin/activate
(awscli) $ pip install awscli

Place your AWS access key and secret key and your preferred region in the AWS cli configuration file at ~/.aws/config, for example:

[default]
aws_access_key_id=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
aws_secret_access_key=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
region=eu-central-1

At this point you should be able to run aws commands, for example try:

$ aws ec2 describe-regions

Uploading the image to an S3 bucket

Assuming you have an S3 bucket called mybucket, you can upload the cloud VMDK image directly:

$ aws s3 cp omnios-r151042.cloud.vmdk s3://mybucket/omnios-r151042.cloud.vmdk
$ aws s3 ls mybucket
2022-07-22 11:26:16  653241856 omnios-r151042.cloud.vmdk

Import the image into an EBS snapshot

Prepare a JSON file to describe the import operation. For the image uploaded above this would look something like this where Description is what you want to call the snapshot and S3Key is the name of the file you placed in S3.

{
    "Description": "omnios-r151042.cloud",
    "Format" : "vmdk",
    "UserBucket": {
        "S3Bucket": "mybucket",
        "S3Key": "omnios-r151042.cloud.vmdk"
    }
}

Now import the snapshot:

$ aws ec2 import-snapshot --disk-container file://disk.json

and monitor this job using:

$ aws ec2 describe-import-snapshot-tasks

until the output shows a Status field showing that the job has completed:

{
    "ImportSnapshotTasks": [
        {
            "ImportTaskId": "import-snap-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx",
            "SnapshotTaskDetail": {
                "DiskImageSize": 653241856.0,
                "Format": "VMDK",
                "SnapshotId": "snap-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx",
                "Status": "completed",
                "UserBucket": {
                    "S3Bucket": "mybucket",
                    "S3Key": "omnios-r151042.cloud.vmdk"
                }
            },
            "Tags": []
        }
    ]
}

Create the AMI

The last step is to create the AMI. Prepare a JSON file to describe the target based on this template. The SnapshotID field must be set to the same value as shown in the previous status command.

{
    "Architecture": "x86_64",
    "Description": "OmniOS illumos distribution",
    "EnaSupport": true,
    "Name": "OmniOS r151042",
    "RootDeviceName": "/dev/xvda",
    "BlockDeviceMappings": [
        {
            "DeviceName": "/dev/xvda",
            "Ebs": {
                "SnapshotId": "snap-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"
            }
        }
    ],
    "VirtualizationType": "hvm",
    "BootMode": "uefi"
}

and import:

$ aws ec2 register-image --cli-input-json file://image.json

This should return quite quickly and show the assigned AMI ID

{
    "ImageId": "ami-001205af9d507d439"
}