Image Description for Amazon EC2

A virtual disk image which is able to boot in the Amazon EC2 cloud framework has to comply the following constraints:

Xen tools and libraries must be installed
cloud-init package must be installed
cloud-init configuration for Amazon must be provided
Grub bootloader modules for Xen must be installed
AWS tools must be installed
Disk size must be set to 10G
Kernel parameters must allow for xen console

To meet this requirements add or update the KIWI NG image description as follows:

Software packages

Make sure to add the following packages to the package list

Note

Package names used in the following list matches the package names of the SUSE distribution and might be different on other distributions.
```
<package name="aws-cli"/>
<package name="grub2-x86_64-xen"/>
<package name="xen-libs"/>
<package name="xen-tools-domU"/>
<package name="cloud-init"/>
```

Image Type definition

Update the oem image type setup as follows

<type image="oem"
      filesystem="ext4"
      kernelcmdline="console=xvc0 multipath=off net.ifnames=0"
      devicepersistency="by-label"
      firmware="ec2">
  <bootloader name="grub2" timeout="1"/>
  <size unit="M">10240</size>
  <machine xen_loader="hvmloader"/>
  <oemconfig>
      <oem-resize>false</oem-resize>
  </oemconfig>
</type>

Cloud Init setup

Cloud init is a service which runs at boot time and allows to customize the system by activating one ore more cloud init modules. For Amazon EC2 the following configuration file /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg needs to be provided as part of the overlay files in your KIWI NG image description

users:
  - default

disable_root: true
preserve_hostname: false
syslog_fix_perms: root:root

datasource_list: [ NoCloud, Ec2, None ]

cloud_init_modules:
  - migrator
  - bootcmd
  - write-files
  - growpart
  - resizefs
  - set_hostname
  - update_hostname
  - update_etc_hosts
  - ca-certs
  - rsyslog
  - users-groups
  - ssh

cloud_config_modules:
  - mounts
  - ssh-import-id
  - locale
  - set-passwords
  - package-update-upgrade-install
  - timezone

cloud_final_modules:
  - scripts-per-once
  - scripts-per-boot
  - scripts-per-instance
  - scripts-user
  - ssh-authkey-fingerprints
  - keys-to-console
  - phone-home
  - final-message
  - power-state-change

system_info:
  default_user:
    name: ec2-user
    gecos: "cloud-init created default user"
    lock_passwd: True
    sudo: ["ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL"]
    shell: /bin/bash
  paths:
    cloud_dir: /var/lib/cloud/
    templates_dir: /etc/cloud/templates/
  ssh_svcname: sshd

An image built with the above setup can be uploaded into the Amazon EC2 cloud and registered as image. For further information on how to upload to EC2 see: ec2uploadimg