Amazon Linux 2 runs on OpenStack perfectly fine. There is only one glitch that you should be aware of. Amazon Linux 2 won’t accept metadata and user data provided by OpenStack on boot. That means that you won’t be able to SSH into the instance after it comes up. In this brief tutorial, we are going to modify the Amazon Linux 2 image to fix this problem.

You can download Amazon Linux 2 images from https://cdn.amazonlinux.com/os-images/latest/. An image suitable for OpenStack is located in the kvm subdirectory. I downloaded the amzn2-kvm-2017.12.0.20180330-x86_64.xfs.gpt.qcow2 version of the image. By the time you are reading this tutorial, a newer version of the image may be available.

In the rest of this article, I’m going to use my machine that is running RHEL7 to modify the Amazon Linux 2 image. First, let’ download the image:

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$ wget https://cdn.amazonlinux.com/os-images/2017.12.0.20180330/kvm/amzn2-kvm-2017.12.0.20180330-x86_64.xfs.gpt.qcow2

Next, let’s install the qemu-img utility useful for manipulating qcow2 images:

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$ sudo yum install qemu-img

Now we can convert the Amazon Linux 2 image from the qcow2 format to the raw format:

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$ qemu-img convert -f qcow2 -O raw amzn2-kvm-2017.12.0.20180330-x86_64.xfs.gpt.qcow2 amzn2-kvm.raw

The previous command creates a file amzn2-kvm.raw in the current working directory. This file is a binary image of the virtual machine disk. We can explore it using the fdisk command:

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$ fdisk -l amzn2-kvm.raw
Disk amzn2-kvm.raw: 26.8 GB, 26843545600 bytes, 52428800 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk label type: gpt
Disk identifier: 88B4CB3B-A2F1-4C9C-82DC-F18B0F440F56


#         Start          End    Size  Type            Name
 1         4096     52428766     25G  Linux filesyste Linux
128         2048         4095      1M  BIOS boot       BIOS Boot Partition

The output of the fdisk command shows that the disk contains two partitions. The size of the first partition is 25 GB and it holds a Linux filesystem. On the disk, the Linux filesystem starts at the sector number 4096. Given that the size of the sector is 512 bytes, we can tell that the Linux filesystem starts at offset 2097152 (4096 * 512) bytes from the start of the disk image. Knowing the offset of the Linux filesystem, let’s loop mount the Linux filesystem under /mnt:

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$ sudo mount -o loop,offset=2097152 amzn2-kvm.raw /mnt

If everything went well, we can now take a look at the cloud-init configuration of the Amazon Linux 2 image:

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$ sudo vi /mnt/etc/cloud/cloud.cfg

In the cloud-init configuration file, you can find the data source list set as follows:

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datasource_list: [ NoCloud, AltCloud, ConfigDrive, OVF, None ]

Sadly, none of the listed data sources is available on OpenStack. OpenStack supports its own data source called OpenStack. Alternatively, OpenStack is compatible with the AWS data source called Ec2. This compatibility ensures that virtual machine images designed for EC2 will work properly on OpenStack. I would expect that the Ec2 data source would be included in the data source list of the Amazon Linux 2 image but it is not. Let’s add the OpenStack data source to the list:

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datasource_list: [ OpenStack, NoCloud, AltCloud, ConfigDrive, OVF, None ]

I put the OpenStack data source at the beginning of the list. You can choose to add it anywhere else. Just make sure that the None data source remains as the last one on the list. None is a fallback datasource used when no other datasources can be selected and it provides empty metadata and empty user data.

After you saved your changes, you can unmount the Linux filesystem:

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$ sudo umount /mnt

And convert the modified image back to the qcow2 format:

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$ qemu-img convert -f raw -O qcow2 amzn2-kvm.raw amzn2-kvm.qcow2

Now you can upload the modified image into the OpenStack image repository:

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$ openstack image create --min-disk 25 --min-ram 512 --container-format bare --disk-format qcow2 --file amzn2-kvm.qcow2 amzn2-kvm

After the image upload into OpenStack has completed, you can create a test virtual machine off of this image:

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$ openstack server create --image amzn2-kvm --flavor m1.medium --key-name <key-name> --nic net-id=<net-id> amzn-test

Note that in the above command, you’ll have to replace the <key-name> and <net-id> placeholders with the name of your key pair and the name of the network you want your instance to be attached to. After the virtual machine has booted up, you should be able to connect to it using SSH. Note that the default user enabled on the Amazon Linux 2 image is ec2-user:

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$ ssh ec2-user@amzn-test
Last login: Sun Apr 22 05:08:45 2018 from ales.dev.ussd.verimatrix.com

       __|  __|_  )
       _|  (     /   Amazon Linux 2 AMI
      ___|\___|___|

https://aws.amazon.com/amazon-linux-2/
No packages needed for security; 8 packages available
Run "sudo yum update" to apply all updates.

This is the end of the tutorial. You have a working Amazon Linux 2 image on OpenStack, congratulations! If you have any comments or questions, let me know in the comment section below.