Recent I was tasked with looking at how I could scale our current infrastruce onto Amazons EC2 under high load. I decided that although there where ALOT of different flavours of community ami's on offer I would really like to roll my own as this would give me total control what was and wasn't installed.
The route I choose was it create a Centos 5.2 VMWare image then convert it to an ami using the amzon tool library. This created larger ami images but seemed to be the quickest and easiest way to do it. Below I have outlined the steps I took.