BUILD.md

Build an AMI

Prerequisites

• AWS administrator account credentials
• aws CLI
• Packer

Export AWS credentials

Add your AWS credentials as two environment variables, AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY, replacing <YOUR_ACCESS_KEY> and <YOUR_SECRET_KEY> with their respective values.

export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=<YOUR_ACCESS_KEY>
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=<YOUR_SECRET_KEY>

Use Packer to build and upload an AMI to an AWS region

Copy common scripts into place

cp ../../../../scripts/init.sh .
cp ../../../../scripts/kind-load-cafile.sh .
cp ../../../../scripts/inventory.sh .

(Optional) Fetch Tanzu CLI

cp ../../../../scripts/fetch-tanzu-cli.sh .
./fetch-tanzu-cli.sh {VMWUSER} {VMWPASS} linux {TANZU_CLI_VERSION}

Replace {VMWUSER} and {VMWPASS} with credentials you use to authenticate to https://console.cloud.vmware.com. Replace {TANZU_CLI_VERSION} with a supported (and available) version number for the CLI you wish to embed in the container image. If your account has been granted access, the script will download a tarball, extract the Tanzu CLI and place it into a dist directory. The tarball and other content will be discarded. (The script has "smarts" built-in to determine whether or not to fetch a version of the CLI that may have already been fetched and placed in the dist directory).

(Optional) Fetch and install oci CLI

cp ../scripts/fetch-and-install-oci-cli.sh .

You're just copying this script into place.

Type the following to build the image

packer init .
packer fmt .
packer validate .
packer inspect .
packer build -only='{BUILD_NAME}.*' .

Replace {BUILD_NAME} with one of [ standard, with-tanzu ]; a file provisioner uploads the Tanzu CLI into your image when set to with-tanzu. You have the option post image build to fetch and install or upgrade it via vmw-cli. The fetch-tanzu-cli.sh script is also packaged and available for your convenience in the resultant image.

In ~10 minutes you should notice a manifest.json file where within the artifact_id contains a reference to the image ID.

Available overrides

You may wish to size the instance and/or choose a different region to host the image.

packer build --var instance_type=m4.xlarge --var vpc_region=eu-west-3 -only='standard.*' .

Consult the variable blocks inside ami.pkr.hcl

For your consideration

• Packer and AWS: Tutorial - Build an image
• Amazon EC2 AMI Locator
  • Ubuntu 20.04 AMD ebs-ssd images
    • us-east-1 - ami-019212a8baeffb0fa
    • us-west-2 - ami-02868af3c3df4b3aa
    • eu-west-3 - ami-06d3fffafe8d48b35
• Amazon AMI Builder
• AMI Builder (EBS backed)