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Amazon EC2 ami manifests and architecture mismatches

So I'm muddling my way through various means of managing an AWS infrastructure. We're currently using Opscode's chef and their online SaaS implementation (experimentally). When using the chef tool 'knife' to boot up an EC2 server using one of our custom AMIs, I kept getting an error:

---cut---

/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/excon-0.1.4/lib/excon/connection.rb:67:in 
`request': InvalidParameterValue => The requested instance type's architecture 
(i386) does not match the architecture in the manifest for ami-xxxxxxxx (x86_64) 
(Fog::AWS::EC2::Error)

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...after mucking about for a bit, I have discovered that AMIs whose declared arch is x86_64 (and, presumably, whose arch2 is amd64) *cannot* be used to instantiate running instances whose type are m1.small or m1.large. This matters because while some DSL tools (*cough* chef *cough) have the means to specify and pass thru an instance 'flavor' to the EC2 toolset, they can't/don't/won't accept or pass thru an 'arch' value. So the error message is a bit of a red herring. In my case above, I changed the instantiation command from specifying '-f m1.large' to '-f m1.xlarge' and...voila, it worked.

Posted by jbz at July 12, 2010 2:23 PM | TrackBack