Environment: Ubuntu 12.04 with Nova Essex milestone-proposed (from source), and the bleeding edge PPA for remaining OpenStack components (https://launchpad.net/~openstack-ppa/+archive/bleeding-edge).
The first time I try to run an instance I get an error which only goes away when I do a euca-describe-images.
root@compy:/home/fubar# euca-run-instances --kernel aki-00000001 -t m1.tiny ami-00000002 --key project_503
ImageNotFound: Image aki-00000001 could not be found.
root@compy:/home/fubar# euca-run-instances --kernel aki-00000001 -t m1.tiny ami-00000002 --key project_503
ImageNotFound: Image aki-00000001 could not be found.
root@compy:/home/fubar# euca-describe-images
IMAGE aki-00000001 None (natty-server-uec-amd64-vmlinuz-virtual) available public kernel instance-store
IMAGE ami-00000002 None (natty-server-uec-amd64.img) available public machine instance-store
root@compy:/home/fubar# euca-run-instances --kernel aki-00000001 -t m1.tiny ami-00000002 --key project_503
RESERVATION r-us972xu5 project_503 default
INSTANCE i-00000001 ami-00000002 server-1 server-1 pending project_503 (project_503, None) 0 m1.tiny 2012-03-21T17:47:36.000Z unknown zone aki-00000001 monitoring-disabled instance-store
Not sure if need to be fixed. How do you know the id of the kernel that you wish to launch until you have described instances?
image ec2 ids are assigned on demand. You are cheating and assuming that the kernel will be called aki-00000001 because it was the first image you uploaded, but IMO this is an invalide assumption. We could work around this by forcing a list and retry on not-found, but IMO this case will never exist in a real deploy, it is only a concern in toy-cloud implementations where you happen to know the order that you ordered images.
I'm marking this won't fix for now. Feel free to reopen if you disagree.