It is explained in the opening paragraphs here[1] but I'll explain. There are two ways to make AMIs: EBS-backed or instance-store. For instance-store, you basi

It is explained in the opening paragraphs here[1] but I'll explain. There are two ways to make AMIs: EBS-backed or instance-store. For instance-store, you basically need to debootstrap a chroot or something like that. You can do this offline, technically. EBS-backed you just launch a source AMI, build on that, then re-snapshot it. For the purposes of a 0.1, Packer currently only supports the EBS-backed approach. This is not a technical limitation, however, and in a future version I do want to add the ability to make instance store. [1]: http://www.packer.io/docs/builders/amazon-ebs.html http://www.packer.io/docs/builders/amazon-ebs.html