[chef] Re: knife ec2 plugin

[John Martinez < >]

On Sep 13, 2012, at 9:01 AM, Daniel DeLeo < "> > wrote:

On Thursday, September 13, 2012 at 7:46 AM, Maven User wrote:

Hi all -

With knife's ec2 plugin (which is awesome), I can create and instance from an ami, but I cannot go the other way.

The use case is this:

virgin ubuntu 12.X ami -> knife clone/bootstrap with our product -> create ami from this instance (for consumption elsewhere)

Before I start diving down this rabbit hole, is/was there a reason NOT to do this?  Time? Or was there a technical reason?  Does this feature exist and I don't see it?

Just curious, seems like a good feature to have but don't want to waste a ton of time if there was a technical reason NOT to do this.

Creating an AMI is an involved process. Most people only follow the pattern you describe when their initial chef-client runs take a prohibitive amount of time and they need really fast instance creation for things like autoscaling.

Concur. From my experience, the two main reasons I use to create custom AMIs in AWS to use in conjunction with Chef:

1. To cut-down on instance boot up time (as described by Daniel)
2. You are using Autoscaling or CloudFormation where the knife API command can't be used

-john