Kickstart a Fedora (Anaconda) Install on EC2

[Jeremy Katz]

On Mon, Jan 31, 2011 at 5:09 PM, Brian LaMere
<brian at cukerinteractive.com> wrote:
> aye, ami-creator doesn't do EBS-backed AMIs though, right?  It makes a local
> image which you then upload to s3, and then you're ephemeral.  if you're
> good with that, then hey :)

Right, it's entirely ephemeral AMIs at this point.  Unfortunately,
doing more is somewhere between tough and impossible in a sane way as
there isn't really a good API for uploading an EBS backed AMI.  It's
all "dd onto a block device, snapshot, foo".

> An EBS-backed AMI that was just a shell looking for a spacewalk/satellite
> server for guidance on what to become (or listening to an SQS queue for info
> on what to build, or....etc etc) is the next matter.  The biggest question
> is then that: where it is you want to get that info about the type of
> install to then do?

Yep, would definitely be pretty cool.  And it should be relatively
straight-forward to do without requiring too much work on the anaconda
front.  In terms of keeping things relatively consistent with a normal
install path, the path of least resistance is probably just sticking
what would be kernel command line params in user data and then having
anaconda know to look there if it notices it's running in EC2.  Then
you can install to your EBS volume, reboot and voila.

If I get to where I'm doing more with EBS backed AMIs, I'll probably
sit down and look at it if no one has tackled it before then.  That
said, if someone wanted to tackle it before then and wanted some
pointers on anaconda code, etc, then let me know and I could
definitely try to be a helpful resource for that.

- Jeremy