After Amazon launched EC2 back in 2006, they’ve been adding new features in regular intervals. On EC2, for starters, one thing that confuses a lot is the lack of persistent storage - in simple words, you lose all changes made and data once you reboot. There were options like S3 and EBS though to over come this problem. But, much configuration is needed, need for regular backups, booting was slower etc., etc.

One of their recent addition to features list is EBS-backed AMI. It allows an EBS volume to be root device for an instance, in other words, one can boot an instance from EBS volume. Property of EBS is being persistent, which automatically makes your instance’s root persistant, which means, one can reboot their instance as much as they want without having to worry about losing changes they made to the settings or their data. So, conclusion is EBS backed EC2 is … cool.

But, if you are an Ubuntu guy like me, you would be disappointed to see that there are only 4 (as of now) public EBS based Ubuntu Images on EC2 right now, and you would be even more disappointed to see that none of them is Hardy (8.04.3 LTS) image. No LTS image. But, Everything’s shiny captain, nothing to fret. One very nice tutorial and a kick-ass Python API for EC2 come to rescue.

This tutorial on Elastician which is based on Boto comes to rescue and help you to create an EBS-backed AMI. Before going through and following that tutorial, just make sure that you have latest version of Boto (>1.8d). Just make sure that the AMI which you are using to create an EBS-backed AMI is a reliable one.

By the way, you can see an awesome list of available images at The Cloud Market.