cert-ec2.pem is Amazon's public X.509 certification. ec2-bundle-vol needs it to bundle up an image to S3. But the EC2 API tools shipped with Amazon Linux AMI seem to exclude this crucial file when bundling up from an instance-store backed instance. This can cause problems down the road when you want to further customize your AMI. For example, Amazon has a 32-bit instance-store backed AMI in the us-east region with ID "ami-4b814f22". We launch an EC2 instance with this AMI, customize it, bundle it up using ec2-bundle-vol, and finally register the bundle. So we are now at, say, ami-12345678. We launch a new EC2 instance with ami-12345678, customize it again and then bundle up the new customization. But the ec2-bundle-vol command will fail this time with an error like this:
error reading certificate file /opt/aws/amitools/ec2/etc/ec2/amitools/cert-ec2.pem: No such file or directory - /opt/aws/amitools/ec2/etc/ec2/amitools/cert-ec2.pem
This looks like a bug in EC2 tools shipped by Amazon. An easy but tedious workaround is to launch an instance off the original Amazon AMI, i.e ami-4b814f22 and then copy over the cert-ec2.pem before running ec2-bundle-vol .
This problem has been reported here. Hope Amazon will devise a fix soon to save users from this misery.
