Amazon EC2 AMIs are stored in and retrieved from Amazon S3. This means you will need to sign up for Amazon S3. If you already have an Amazon S3 account, you can skip this step.
To sign for the Amazon S3 service, visit the Amazon S3 home page and click the "Sign up for this service" button in the upper right corner. If you don't already have an AWS account, you will be prompted to create one as part of the sign up process.
Once you have signed up for Amazon S3, move your mouse over the button labeled "Your Web Services Account" and select the "View Access Key Identifiers" link on the menu that appears. Be sure to note down your AWS account's Access Key ID and Secret Access Key. You will need these later to bundle your own image.
After you have signed up for Amazon S3, you'll need to sign up for Amazon EC2. To sign your AWS account up for the Amazon EC2 service, log into your AWS account and then follow the link to Amazon EC2 under the "Browse Web Services" section on the left. Click on the "Sign Up For Web Service" button in the top right of the screen and follow the on-screen instructions.
Once you've signed up for Amazon EC2, move your mouse over the button labeled "Your Web Services Account" and select the "View Access Key Identifiers" link on the menu that appears. At the bottom of this page is a section titled "Your X.509 Certificate". Follow the "Create New" button in this section to create a new X.509 certificate. Follow the link to create a new X.509 certificate and save the certificate and private key. You'll need this shortly when you set up our command line tools. Save these files with the filenames offered by your browser. You should end up with a PEM-encoded X509 certificate and a private key file named as per the examples below:
cert-HKZYKTAIG2ECMXYIBH3HXV4ZBZQ55CLO.pem:
A PEM encoded signed X.509 certificate.
pk-HKZYKTAIG2ECMXYIBH3HXV4ZBZQ55CLO.pem:
An unencrypted, PEM encoded RSA private key that corresponds to
the X.509 certificate above.
This X.509 certificate will be associated with your account until you generate or upload a new certificate. If you have an existing certificate you'd prefer to use, you can come back to the "Access Key Identifiers" page later and upload that.
Finally, you'll need to look up your AWS account ID. You should use this value whenever you need to provide an EC2 user ID. Staying with the AWS portal page, move your mouse over the button labeled "Your Web Services Account" and select the "Account Activity" link on the menu that appears. At the top of this page, just under the Account Activity title, you should see a label named "Account Number", followed by a hyphenated number. Something like this:
4952-1993-3132
Your AWS account ID, with the hyphens removed is your EC2 user ID. The example above would be 495219933132.
That's it. You're all set to start setting up your tools.