[chef] Re: Creating Amazon AMI's from Running Instances

[Clif Smith < >]

I use a multi-pronged approach to this.  I have a image (Amazon AMI) with only the changes being the installation of the Omnibus client and the validation.pem.  I then use that and a base-image role which only installs packages that all of my systems use.  I use the base-image as my golden image as I ran into a networking problem that caused new images to hang due to package installations/updates.  When new images are spun up they only have to configure software that's already installed and then deploy my company's software so my deploy time has decreased and I've lessened my dependencies somewhat as well.

-- 
cjs

On Friday, November 11, 2011 at 4:05 PM, Chris Streeter wrote:

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