How to create a persistent ebs backed AMI?

I would like to create a 64 bit ubuntu AMI that is backed by EBS and is persistent. By persistent, I mean tha开发者_StackOverflow中文版t I want to be able to seamlessly make changes to the AMI without worrying about snapshotting it myself. What is the best way to do this? Are there any services that provide this kind of service?

There are so many blog posts which talk about getting started on ec2, but so few which have any interesting detail in them.

As time goes by more of these services are popping up. Check out Turnkey Linux, which is relatively mature. Another option is DotCloud.

I just set up an instance of CentOs 5.4 where I made an AMI of my server configuration and then make backups of the entire database and files every day with snapshots. I made a detailed tutorial about it here: http://www.sundh.com/blog/2011/02/scheduled-backups-on-ebs-instance/