Why is "Bundle Instance" disabled for EC2 instance running Ubuntu 12.04?

Solution 1:

Bundle Instance, from the AWS console, is equivalent to running ec2-bundle-instance. This command is only available on Windows instances, and as such, the AWS console option is only enabled for Windows instances. You cannot bundle an instance-store Linux AMI from the AWS console at this time.

To create an AMI of your Linux instance you will need to SSH into your instance and use Amazon's AMI and API (command line) tools. Amazon details the process in their documentation. Briefly:

1. You will need your certificate and private key on the instance
2. Create a bundle of the root volume using: ec2-bundle-vol
3. Upload the bundle to S3 using: ec2-upload-bundle
4. Register the AMI using: ec2-register (at this point you can also specify a block device mapping to associate additional snapshots and ephemeral volumes with the AMI).