Guided Lab: Creating an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) from an EBS-backed EC2 instance

Create an EC2 instance using the following configurations:

• Name: stallions
• Instance type: t2.nano
• AMI: Linux
• Key pair: Create a new key pair.
  • Key pair name: td-stallions
  • Key pair type: RSA
  • Private key file format: .pem
• Security group name: WebServerSG
• Description: enter ‘Allows SSH and HTTP access‘.
• Inbound Security Group Rules: (Add security group rule)
  • Inbound rule 1:
    • Type: SSH
    • Source Type: My IP
  • Inbound rule 2
    • Type: HTTP
    • Source Type: Anywhere (0.0.0.0/0)

Review your instance configurations and click the “Launch Instance” button.

In this section, we’ll make changes to the EC2 instance by configuring a simple web server on it.

1. Open up a terminal, then run the command below to connect to your instance via SSH.

ssh -i /path/to/YOUR-KEY.pem ec2-user@YOUR-EC2-PUBLIC-IP

2. Once connected, run the command below:

# Step 1: Update the system
sudo yum update -y

# Step 2: Install Nginx
sudo yum install nginx -y

# Step 3: Start Nginx Service
sudo service nginx start

# Create a custom HTML page directly in the HTML directory
echo '<h1>Welcome to my web page!</h1>' | sudo tee /usr/share/nginx/html/mypage.html > /dev/null

# Add the configuration directly
echo 'server {
    listen 80 default_server;
    server_name _;
    root /usr/share/nginx/html;
    
    location / {
        index mypage.html;
    }
}' | sudo tee /etc/nginx/conf.d/server.conf > /dev/null

# Reload Nginx for the changes to take effect
sudo nginx -t && sudo service nginx reload

#Automatically start NGINX at boot time
sudo systemctl enable nginx

3. After restarting the nginx, check your web server.

In this section, we’ll create an AMI from the EC2 instance, which will now include the configurations for the web server.

1. In the navigation pane, select the “Instances” tab.

2. Choose the instance to create an AMI, click “Actions“, and select “Create image” in the dropdown menu under “Image and templates“.

3. Provide the following details on the “Create image” page:

• Image name: Enter ‘tdplaycloud-AMI.’

4. Enable the No Reboot option.

5. In the “Instance volumes” section, the default EBS volume setting indicates that an EBS volume will back your AMI.

6. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click “Create image.”

7. In the left-hand menu, click on “AMIs.”

8. Select the AMI and verify if the status is pending under the Details tab.

9. The AMI creation process may take up to 5 minutes.

10. Confirm that the AMI has been successfully created by checking if the status is available.

Now that we have our custom AMI, let’s launch an instance from it to confirm that our web server configuration is preserved.

1. In the left-hand navigation panel, click on “AMI“, select the AMI that you want to use to create an EC2 instance and click on “Launch instance from AMI“.

2. In the “Name and tags” section, enter “new-playcloudAMI-instance” under Name.

3. In the “Instance type” section, ensure that the t2.micro instance type is selected.

4. Select the existing Key Pair.

5. Review the summary section and click “Launch instance“.

7. A confirmation page will inform you that your instance is launching and the changes have been preserved.

To deregister an AMI in the Amazon EC2 console, follow these steps:

1. In the navigation pane, click on the AMIs option.

2. Select the AMI you want to deregister and make a note of its ID. This information may come in handy in the next step when you need to find and delete related snapshots.

3. Click on the Actions button and choose the Deregister AMI option.

4. When prompted to confirm that you want to deregister the AMI, click on Deregister AMI.