EC2

The EC2 provider automatically creates a volume for bootstrapping (be it EBS or S3), makes a snapshot of it once it is done and registers it as an AMI. EBS volume backing only works on an EC2 host while S3 backed volumes should work locally (at this time however they do not, a fix is in the works).

Unless the cloud-init plugin is used, special startup scripts will be installed that automatically fetch the configured authorized_key from the instance metadata and save or run any userdata supplied (if the userdata begins with #! it will be run). Set the variable install_init_scripts to False in order to disable this behaviour.

Manifest settings

Credentials

The AWS credentials can be configured in two ways: Via the manifest or through environment variables. To bootstrap S3 backed instances you will need a user certificate and a private key in addition to the access key and secret key, which are needed for bootstraping EBS backed instances.

The settings describes below should be placed in the credentials key under the provider section.

  • access-key: AWS access-key. May also be supplied via the environment variable $AWS_ACCESS_KEY required for EBS & S3 backing
  • secret-key: AWS secret-key. May also be supplied via the environment variable $AWS_SECRET_KEY required for EBS & S3 backing
  • certificate: Path to the AWS user certificate. Used for uploading the image to an S3 bucket. May also be supplied via the environment variable $AWS_CERTIFICATE required for S3 backing
  • private-key: Path to the AWS private key. Used for uploading the image to an S3 bucket. May also be supplied via the environment variable $AWS_PRIVATE_KEY required for S3 backing
  • user-id: AWS user ID. Used for uploading the image to an S3 bucket. May also be supplied via the environment variable $AWS_USER_ID required for S3 backing

Example:

---
provider:
  name: ec2
  credentials:
    access-key: AFAKEACCESSKEYFORAWS
    secret-key: thes3cr3tkeyf0ryourawsaccount/FS4d8Qdva

Virtualization

EC2 supports both paravirtual and hardware virtual machines. The virtualization type determines various factors about the virtual machine performance (read more about this in the EC2 docs).

  • virtualization: The virtualization type Valid values: pvm, hvm required

Example:

---
provider:
  name: ec2
  virtualization: hvm

Enhanced networking

Install enhanced networking drivers to take advantage of SR-IOV capabilities on hardware virtual machines. Read more about this in the EC2 docs.

Example:

---
provider:
  name: ec2
  virtualization: hvm
  enhanced_networking: simple

Image

  • description: Description of the AMI. manifest vars
  • bucket: When bootstrapping an S3 backed image, this will be the bucket where the image is uploaded to. required for S3 backing
  • region: Region in which the AMI should be registered. required for S3 backing

Example:

---
provider:
  name: ec2
  description: Debian {system.release} {system.architecture}
  bucket: debian-amis
  region: us-west-1

Dependencies

To communicate with the AWS API boto is required (version 2.14.0 or higher) you can install boto with pip install boto (on wheezy, the packaged version is too low). S3 images are chopped up and uploaded using euca2ools (install with apt-get install euca2ools).