[chef] Creating Amazon AMI's from Running Instances

[Chris Streeter < >]

Hi all, I'm currently using chef and bootstrapping my instances with user data. However, I've found that just the process of bootstrapping the instance (installing the required packages, updating, etc) takes longer than I'd like it to. So what I'd like to do is to bootstrap an instance with a run list that I'm going to be using often (ie. a www server) and then create an AMI out of that instance. Then, later, when I want to launch another instance of that AMI, I'll just re-run the chef bootstraping to make sure the instance is configured how I'd like to be.

My question is then, how do I "clean" the instance of chef before I create an AMI from it so that I can bootstrap it again upon a new creation?

Thanks!

- Chris