Home / server / Questions / 442794
Accepted
chris
Asked: 2012-10-27 10:43:18 +0800 CST

Creating an AMI from an EC2 instance with mounted volumes

  • 772

I have an EBS-backed instance with a 2nd mounted volume (I followed the steps in Eric's Article)

I then created an AMI from that instance, and ran an instance from that AMI.

That 2nd instance then created two volumes.

Is there a way to control how the volumes associated with with an AMI are created, or is the solution just to unmount the 2nd volume before creating the AMI?

amazon-ec2

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The ec2-create-image command line tool has a --block-device-mapping option to define the volumes associated with new instances.

    http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/CommandLineReference/ApiReference-cmd-CreateImage.html

    In your specific case, you may want to suppress the automatic creation and attaching of the database volume by specifying something like:

    ec2-create-image --block-device-mapping /dev/sdh=none [...]

    This will let you create and attach your own volumes to the new instances.

    Alternatively, you could specify that an empty volume be created an attached when a new instance is started:

    ec2-create-image --block-device-mapping /dev/sdh=:20:false [...]

    When you run an instance, you could override the size of that volume using the --block-device-mapping option to ec2-run-instances.

    It's also worth learning about the delete-on-termination flag for --block-device-mapping so that you understand how to control whether your second volume should automatically be deleted when the instance is terminated.

    • 3