# Customizing a Photon OS Machine on EC2 This section illustrates how to upload an `ami` image of Photon OS to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and customize the Photon OS machine by using cloud-init with an EC2 data source. The Amazon machine image version of Photon OS is available as a free download on Bintray: https://bintray.com/vmware/photon/ The cloud-init service is commonly used on EC2 to configure the cloud instance of a Linux image. On EC2, for example, cloud-init typically sets the `.ssh/authorized_keys` file to let you log in with a private key from another computer--that is, a computer besides the workstation that you are already using to connect with the Amazon cloud. The cloud-config user-data file that appears in the following example contains abridged SSH authorized keys to show you how to set them. Working with EC2 requires Amazon accounts for both AWS and EC2 with valid payment information. If you execute the following examples, you will be charged by Amazon. You will need to replace the `<placeholders>` for access keys and other account information in the examples with your account information. The following code assumes you have installed and set up the Amazon AWS CLI and the EC2 CLI tools, including `ec2-ami-tools`. See [Installing the AWS Command Line Interface](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/installing.html) and [Setting Up the Amazon EC2 Command Line Interface Tools on Linux](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/CommandLineReference/set-up-ec2-cli-linux.html). Also see [Setting Up the AMI Tools](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/set-up-ami-tools.html). EC2 requires an SSH key and an RSA certificate. The code in the examples assumes that you have created SSH keys as well as an RSA user signing certificate and its corresponding private RSA key file. Here's a code example that shows how to upload the Photon OS `.ami` image to the Amazon cloud and configure it with cloud-init. The correct virtualization type for Photon OS is `hvm`. $ mkdir bundled $ tar -zxvf ./photon-ami.tar.gz $ ec2-bundle-image -c ec2-certificate.pem -k ec2-privatekey.pem -u <EC2 account id> --arch x86_64 --image photon-ami.raw --destination ./bundled/ $ aws s3 mb s3://<bucket-name> $ ec2-upload-bundle --manifest ./bundled/photon-ami.manifest.xml --bucket <bucket-name> --access-key <Account Access Key> --secret-key <Account Secret key> $ ec2-register <bucket-name>/photon-ami.manifest.xml --name photon-ami --architecture x86_64 --virtualization-type hvm In the following command, the `--user-data-file` option instructs cloud-init to import the cloud-config data in `user-data.txt`. The next command assumes you have created the keypair called `mykeypair` and the security group photon-sg as well as uploaded the user-data.txt file; see the EC2 documentation. $ ec2-run-instances <ami-ID> --instance-type m3.medium -g photon-sg --key mykeypair --user-data-file user-data.txt You can now describe the instance to see its ID: $ ec2-describe-instances And you can run the following command to obtain its public IP address, which you can use to connect to the instance with SSH: $ aws ec2 describe-instances --instance-ids <instance-id> --query 'Reservations[*].Instances[*].PublicIpAddress' --output=text $ ec2-describe-images **Important**: When you are done, run the following commands to terminate the machine. Because Amazon charges you while the host is running, make sure to shut it down: $ ec2-deregister <ami-image-identifier> $ ec2-terminate-instances <instance-id> Here are the contents of the user-data.txt file that cloud-init applies to the machine the first time that it boots up in the cloud: #cloud-config hostname: photon-on-01 groups: - cloud-admins - cloud-users users: - default - name: photonadmin gecos: photon test admin user primary-group: cloud-admins groups: cloud-users lock-passwd: false passwd: vmware - name: photonuser gecos: photon test user primary-group: cloud-users groups: users passwd: vmware packages: - vim ssh_authorized_keys: - ssh-rsa MIIEogIBAAKCAQEAuvHKAjBhpwuomcUTpIzJWRJAe71JyBgAWrwqyN1Mk5N+c9X5 Ru2fazFA7WxQSD1KyTEvcuf8JzdBfrEJ0v3/nT2x63pvJ8fCl6HRkZtHo8zRu8vY KYTZS/sdvM/ruubHfq1ldRpgtYSqbkykoe6PCQIDAQABAoIBAEgveQtjVzHDhLTr rmwJmO316ERfkQ/chLaElhi9qwYJG/jqlNIISWFyztqD1b3fxU6m5MOBIujh7Xpg ... ec3test@example.com Now check the cloud-init output log file on EC2 at `/var/log/cloud-init-output.log`. For more information on using cloud-init user data on EC2, see [Running Commands on Your Linux Instance at Launch](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/user-data.html). An article on the Photon OS GitHub wiki demonstrates how to get Photon OS up and running on EC2 and run a containerized application in the Docker engine. See [Running Photon OS on Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute](Running-Photon-OS-on-Amazon-Elastic-Cloud-Compute.md). With Photon OS, you can also build cloud images on Google Compute Engine and other cloud providers; see [Compatible Cloud Images](cloud-images.md).