That's one way to get it done.
You can also support multiple regions by copying the uploaded AMI using aws ec2 copy-image if you like.
I left comments suggesting improvement by using awss own --query flag to extract the output instead of filtering through jq (thus reducing the need for yet another tool).
I gave instructions in the comment as much as I can without testing the specific command.

I created initial script for making AMI with importing VMDK. I think this way is more useful for multiple region support.
The commit is here: https://github.com/vyos/vyos-build/commit/3dc5653bbb8133f976e4603c8f78a5f6cf686405
What do you think?

Thanks Amos.

Hi Julian,

In T266#4603, @amos.shapira wrote:

Just posting here in case someone can help me out -

I manage to create a booting VyOS AMI 1.2.0 but it fails to fetch the ssh key and configure ssh daemon due to (as far as I can tell) "setupSession" aborting on a failed assert(3).

The next two steps I intend to try:

1. Configure the AMI to run sshd outside the VyOS configuration just to let me access the setupSession core file
2. Need to get debug symbols for setupSession to try to understand what the variable it aborts on is supposed to hold.

Any tips to help do this would be welcome.

Just posting here in case someone can help me out -

@amos.shapira I was just working through the packer script from the original script you gave me. I'll wait to see what you work out and see if I can apply something similar to GCE

I'm not building the VyOS from source but extract it from the nightly .iso file.
This works great for me with VyOS 1.1.7.
Debian Jessie doesn't have the kernel 3.18 which is required for OverlayFS.

@amos.shapira @silverbp
to save some additional time for you here in T100
You must use Debian Jessie to build 1.2.x

I'm building the VyOS disk image under another OS (latest test using Ubuntu 16.04 LTS) and was testing the extra configuration script under chroot. Your response would explain that the missing unionfs packages on the host OS could explain the error I get. I'll install them and try again.

I have a python script which will read a VPN Connection configuration from a Virtual Gateway and emit VyOS commands to configure it as a client to that VPN connection.

Looks like a worthy endeavor.