Funky Android have created an Amazon Web Services EC2 machine image (AMI) which provides the required environment to build the Android Open Source Project master branch. If you are unfamiliar with EC2 you can find Amazons documentation at http://aws.amazon.com/documentation/ec2/

Please Note: Amazon will charge you for using their EC2 service, it is your responsibility to ensure you are aware of the charges and to pay Amazon for your usage.

We recommend using a “large” instance or better. It may be possible to use smaller images, but the compilation time will be significantly increased. We created the AMI for use with EC2s instance storage due to the improved performance, but you should note that if you terminate your instance this will cause all of your changes to be lost, so you should download any changes you’ve made that you wish to keep before you shut down your instance.

The image is built on Ubuntus 64-bit cloud images for 10.04 LTS with the required additional packages added and a checkout-out of the master branch as of 22nd December 2011.

The image includes a script which runs when you log in that unpacks a copy of the AOSP master branch to /mnt/AOSP-master and runs a repo sync to update it (which takes 20 minutes or so). If you delete that directory and re-log in the script will go through the unpack & sync process again. Having an archive of the AOSP master source code does limit the space on the root partition, so if you are sure you won’t want to unpack the source code again in the same EC2 instance you can delete the AOSP-master.tbz file from the ubuntu users home directory.

We currently recommend using make -j8 to build the source code on a large instance, and you should expect the first build to take around two hours. Subsequent builds should be a lot quicker, but, of course, that will depend on how many changes you make to the source code.

To use the image you should start your EC2 image from the AMI with the ID ami-7502d71c