Kickstart a Fedora (Anaconda) Install on EC2

[Brian LaMere]

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 :)

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?

lemme be more clear:

Need:  a functional replacement for the old use these two types of cases:
1) turning on a machine with PXE-boot that then builds itself magically to
what it is you happen to need
2) a machine that has a tiny bootable CD that knows to look on the network
at magical location X for either the entire kickstart file, or uses a
kickstart file on the CD that then sources to network locations to flesh out
contents of the kickstart.

So, having an AMI that works that way...
1)  hard code it to look for whatever happens to be sitting at location X
for a kickstart file?
2) Have it start up a basic environment that sources to X location for more
info?
3) Have the kickstart file have various logic, and the decisions for the
logic be based on:
3-1) "user-data" info passed during image creation?
3-2) info available at a url?  Ie, check "ec2master.guardis.com/nextec2type"
for a simple answer?
3-3) have kickstart join a queue system of some sort (SQS, AMQP, whatever)
and get info about what to do from the queue?
4) have a spacewalk/satellite server tell the bare-metal install-boot what
to do next?

Yeah, it's something I think I'll sit down and solve relatively soon; I
realized I'm not actually satisfied with making an AMI for each type of role
and then just launching that AMI.  That poses, in my mind, too many
problems...problems that prompted the solutions that have been in place
within datacenters for many years already - be it kickstart servers,
jumpstart servers, software depots, wsus servers...these centralized
solutions for taking a bare installation image and installing whatever you
need next are clearly out there for physical datacenters.  They weren't made
in an absence of need.

So...how then to do those same use cases "in the cloud?"  Do we....need to?
 It seems to me to be an effort worth exploring, but...maybe not?

Whatever the case, we haven't even defined a spec, much less has anyone
solved the problem yet - that I've seen, at least.  Though we might have
been able to get a POC during a few hour hackfest this past weekend, maybe
;)

Brian

2011/1/31 Raphaël De GIUSTI <raphael.degiusti at guardis.com>

> Brian, I would appreciate it. Where can I get feedback from this ?
>
> Michael,
>
> Here's a tutorial for a Centos 5.5 install I found very useful :
>
>
> http://www.ioncannon.net/system-administration/1205/installing-cent-os-5-5-on-ec2-with-the-cent-os-5-5-kernel/
>
>
> <http://www.ioncannon.net/system-administration/1205/installing-cent-os-5-5-on-ec2-with-the-cent-os-5-5-kernel/>As
> for automating the building of Centos 55 and Fedora 14 instances, there's
> the ami-creator from Jeremy Katz that's closer to what I'm looking for as
> you put a kickstart in and an ami pops out :
>
> Here is his blog post about it
>
> http://velohacker.com/fedora-notes/announcing-ami-creator/
>
>
> On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 8:58 PM, Michael Howard <michael at uforlife.com>wrote:
>
>> 2011/1/28 Raphaël De GIUSTI <raphael.degiusti at guardis.com>:
>> > Hi everyone,
>> > I've been playing around with Amazon EC2, building my own Centos and
>> Fedora
>> > EBS backed AMI's without much trouble, following tutorials and other
>> > practices I found on the internet.
>>
>> I have been looking for this kind of information, but not having much
>> luck.
>>
>> Any pointers / URLs to building EBS-backed AMIs for Fedora & CentOS
>> would be appreciated.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Michael
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