how do i get a rightscale or EC2 AMI loaded onto my laptop?

I like to develop locally on my laptop, but want to deploy to EC2/Rightscale. What's the best way to load a 开发者_开发问答rightscale or ec2 AMI onto my local desktop so that i can have a mirror copy of the cloud operating environment that I can develop against?

I haven't tried converting an EC2 AMI to a local VM image, but you could work the other way around: create a local VM to do your development and then convert the VM image into an EC2 AMI. Here's a nice post that explains the process.

You could use an EBS-based AMI, make snapshots of it, and download the snapshots using this tool: https://cloudyscripts.com/tool/show/3

You can try using vagrant. It uses Virtualbox to provision virtual machines and you can use chef-solo to run chef recipes on the virtual machine.