resize of root filesystem from 15G to 10G for new ec2 ebs images

[Scott James Remnant]

Is there a technical dispute about this change?

To me this seems like a simple engineering decision on behalf of the 
development team responsible, and not one that the Technical Board need 
to bless or indeed approve.

Your logic about fitting within the free usage tier is sound, and I 
assume that the filesystem size change actually has no effect on the 
number of packages contained within it?

Scott

On 04/11/2010 01:00, Scott Moser wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I would like to get tech board approval to make a change to the default
> filesystem size of our EC2 EBS-root [1] images from 15GB to 10GB.  This
> request is entirely driven by the desire to fit into Amazon's newly
> created "Free Usage Tier" [2] that was announced late October of 2010.
> The change will allow Amazon customers run an instance of Ubuntu 10.04 or
> 10.10 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for 1 year.  Without that change,
> if a use selects Ubuntu for their image type, they will pay $0.55 per
> month ($ 0.11/GB-Month for the additional 5GB of storage).
>
> There is a bug opened [3] requesting 10GB root filesystem images.
>
> If this item needs discussion, I'd like to have it on the 2010-11-16
> meeting agenda.
>
> Thank you.
> Scott
>
> == some history / background ==
> Ubuntu creates popular images that run on EC2 and publishes them to EC2.
> In December of 2009, Amazon began allowing EC2 image producers such as
> Ubuntu to create "EBS Root" images.  With EBS root images, the root
> filesystem could be any size up to 1TB, the customer would pay per
> provisioned GB.  At that time, Amazon made available some Fedora based
> images that they had created with their release announcement.  Those
> Fedora images had 15GB root disks.  When selecting a root filesystem size,
> Ubuntu followed Amazon's lead and chose 15GB as well.
>
> We refresh our images to update kernels and packages on a roughly monthly
> basis [7].
>
> Other bits of information:
>   * I am not interested in creating (and maintaining) AMIs of both 10 and
>     15GB root.
>   * It is possible (and trivial) to launch instances with a block device
>     larger than the default for an image.  Ie, a user can easily launch an
>     instance with a 15G root volume and 'resize2fs /dev/sda1' if they want
>     a 15G filesystem.
>   * The images we produce contain less than 1GB of data on a filesystem.  A
>     'df -h' shows '667M' Used on maverick images. 10.04 is similar.
>   * bug 670161 comment 1 [4] has many reasons why reducing filesystem is
>     not a big deal.
>   * Without this change, it is plausible that users looking to try out EC2
>     will do so with Amazon Linux AMI [5] or another OS.
>   * It reasonably easy to launch your own one-off image [6]
>   * At UDS we discussed making this change for Natty.  The changes are in
>     place to make Natty use 10G root volumes.
>
> The only reasons I can think for not doing this are:
>   * It is a somewhat arbitrary event to respond to
>   * The cost for a user is only $6.00 per year
>   * This is a change to a stable release
>
> --
> [1] http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2009/12/03/amazon-ec2-instances-now-can-boot-from-amazon-ebs/
> [2] http://aws.amazon.com/free/
> [3] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-on-ec2/+bug/670161
> [4] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-on-ec2/+bug/670161/comments/1
> [5] http://aws.amazon.com/amazon-linux-ami/
> [6] http://ubuntu-smoser.blogspot.com/2010/11/using-ubunt-images-on-aws-free-tier.html
> [7] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UEC/Images/RefreshPolicy
>