Re: build-debian-cloud plugin to build instance-store based AMIs

Hi Christian,

That's awesome!

- It requires euca2ools version 2.x because the commands that handle image bundles are buggy in version 1.x.

Should this be a dependency on the build-environment, or downloaded by this script? I think downloaded may be better, as in 2 years time, stable euca2ools may be too outdated for what we're doing.

- These euca2ools in turn require python-boto >= 2.2 which is currently available in squeeze-backports (2.3) and will be the default version in Wheezy.

Same here for Wheezy - 2.3 should ship in Wheezy; but again, download in this script from upstream instead of using stable package?

- The bundling and image uploading to Amazon S3 requires additional parameters. Since plugins can't add parameters to the main script, I used environment variables. It also requires that some key and certificates be present in files on the system.

Can you please explain. What are the environment variables and their values you had to set for your instance store plug-in?

- The plugin files is a bit messy. It could actually use a "replace_task" function to clean it up because it does a lot of removing and adding similar tasks.

Of course I welcome any feedback on this code and am very much open to suggestions on how to improve it.

I'd love to see this merged back into Anders' codebase.

...My plan this weekend is (after Wheezy launch) to publish Wheezy PVM EBS images in all regions; Christian, I feel it would be better to create the Wheezy Instance-Store AMIs in the Debian AMI account (that AWS is paying for) as the one account that Debian is provisioning these images from. It is from this account that I/we am/are submitting AMIs to the AWS Marketplace - and I can see us submitting both PVM EBS and PVM Instance Store, in both 32 and 64 bit. I'd be keen to see instance-store plug-in merged by Anders - and then have build-debian-cloud tagged/branched in preparation for this weekend's frenzy.

I suspect it will be Sunday (AWST +0800) by the time we're ready to roll. I'll hang out on #debian-cloud then; it will take a US work-day or two for the AWS Marketplace listing to go through.

I am also currently trying to get access to generate HVM images, which requires:
a) the EBS volume we create our image on to be in (hd0,0) and not (hd0)
b) ..which then requires a different AKI-id for pvgrub because of that partition change (patch already submitted to Anders), and...
c) some additional stuff (not possible with euca2ools) that is unlikely to get merged into our current build script.

I'll hang out on #debian-cloud when I start kicking off PVM EBS AMIs. You'll see I've started to put updates on the Wiki[1], ready for us to fill in.