1. You add a group where you define the rights. Here you can select either one or multiple of the default values (Administrator full access, Read only, EC2 full access, EC2 read only…etc) or you can even define custom policies by adding the rules in the Custom profile page. I’ve selected the default EC2 full access that looks like :

{
"Statement": [
{
"Action": "ec2:*",
"Effect": "Allow",
"Resource": "*"
},
{
"Effect": "Allow",
"Action": "elasticloadbalancing:*",
"Resource": "*"
},
{
"Effect": "Allow",
"Action": "cloudwatch:*",
"Resource": "*"
},
{
"Effect": "Allow",
"Action": "autoscaling:*",
"Resource": "*"
}
]
}

2. Once the group is defined next step is to add users to this group.  Once the user name is defined a Access Key Id and Secret Access Key will be generated. Also here you need to define a password for the newly created account.

3. Final step is to test this by accessing a URL like : https://xxxxxxxxx.signin.aws.amazon.com/console where xxxxxxxxx AWS account ID (you find that in your “Security credentials” page)

1. Install ec2-api-tools from http://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads/ec2-api-tools.zip on the failing instance
2. Install Java from http://javadl.sun.com/webapps/download/AutoDL?BundleId=39484 (I’m using a small instance)
3. Set .bashrc as follows:

export EC2_HOME=~/ec2
export PATH=$PATH:$EC2_HOME/bin
export EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=$EC2_HOME/pk.pem
export EC2_CERT=$EC2_HOME/cert.pem
export JAVA_HOME=/usr

Run :

source /root/.bashrc

4. Create a directory for the bundled files (/mnt/myimage in my case)
5. Bundle the actual instance using:

ec2-bundle-vol –cert ec2/cert.pem –privatekey ec2/pk.pem -s 2048 -u Your_AWS_Account_ID -d /mnt/myimage/

-u : AWS Account ID is taken from AWS page Security Credentials, e.g: 1234-5678-9012-3456. Make sure to skip the “-” when using it.
-s : size of the image
-d : directory from step 4

6. Upload the files to a S3 account using:

ec2-upload-bundle -a access_key -s secret_key -b bucket_name –manifest /mnt/myimage/image.manifest.xml

-a : access_key from Security Credentials page
-s : secret_key from Security Credentials page
-b : bucket name
–manifest : name of the manifest file

7. Register the AMI by going to your AWS EC2 console->AMI->Images->Register new AMI and enter:
bucket_name/image.manifest.xml
8. Create a new EC2 instance by using the newly registered AMI

Note that you will need the [pk,cert].pem files too.

export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=your_key_id
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=your_secret_key

Note : older versions of s3sync had : AWS_ACCESS_KEY ..so dont forget to add : _ID

You can create a script like :

#!/bin/bash
export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=your_key_id
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=your_secret_key

s3cmd listbuckets

This will show all buckets you have on your S3 account.