Need Ubuntu AMI of 10GB in size for Amazon AWS Free Usage Tier in Region “EU West”

For anyone who finds this via Google, try the official Ubuntu AMIs that work: http://cloud.ubuntu.com/2010/11/using-ubuntu-images-on-aws-free-tier/

Updated link: https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/locator/ec2/

From what I've found in researching bits and pieces, it's not easy to do.

To get the image, you can take a snapshot, and mount it to a running instance then just copy down the contents to a local raw file with something like dd over ssh. Then disconnect the volume from the instance, verify you have the image locally stored, and delete the EBS block. That part isn't too difficult if you know how to use DD/compression/ssh to transfer the image and mount it as a local loopback to examine the raw disk image. Tutorials are available for that.

The hard part is getting it to boot. Depending on how your instance was created, it seems that the kernels are usually stripped down Xen kernels, so they may lack hardware support for something like VMWare. You'd have to mount the disk image and install a more generic kernel along with modifying the boot manager. You also would have to iron out the networking, as Amazon had some tweaks put in for handling their virtual network management (DHCP assignments, firewall, routing).

This must be possible; there are tools and tutorials for uploading your own AMI's into the Amazon cloud, just there isn't too much out there on how to go the other way. By the time you're done figuring out how to unravel the spaghetti of configuration hassles you might be better off just getting a list of dependencies for your applications and transferring the configurations and installing dependencies as a new local machine.

Bottom line...it's probably possible, it's possible to go the other way in the conversion, but with the hassle involved unless you're skilled at Linux surgery on the kernel and configuration you might as well use your EC2 instances as a template for rebuilding from the bottom up.