[ubuntu-cloud] Cluster Compute Instances

[Scott Moser]

On Tue, 13 Jul 2010, Jonathan Marston wrote:

> Exciting news from amazon:  http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/07/the-new-amazon-ec2-instance-type-the-cluster-compute-instance.html
>
> The new instance type looks quite powerful! The requirements for AMIs states:
>
> "The Cluster Compute Instances use hardware-assisted (HVM) virtualization instead of the paravirtualization used by the other instance types and requires booting from EBS, so you will need to create a new AMI in order to use them. We suggest that you use our Centos-based AMI as a base for your own AMIs for optimal performance."
>
> How would the Ubuntu EBS Lucid AMI fare? Any plans to support this instance type?

There is very little information at the moment on how you would register a
HVM instance (other than ec2-create-image from within one).  The newest
ec2-api-tools (that are now packaged for maverick) show a 'paravirtual' or
'hvm' field in the image descriptions.

I've not seen anything on how you'd set that on an image that you
registered.  It really seems like they announced this before it was really
ready.  The image they point at is only available in us-east-1.

I'd surely like to offer Ubuntu images for this instance type, and I would
guess its not a terribly large amount of work to get that set up once its
more clear how that is done.  There would likely be more work required to
get the package set that would make them desirable for that work load.  As
discussed in the blog above, they've optimized the load for cluster
compute.

regarding ec2-create-image, I'd be interested if someone would boot the
given CentOS image, then replace / with the contents of a UEC image and
attempt 'ec2-create-image' at that point.  It seems to me that everything
should be there.

Long term, hopefully I'll be able to get images up with identical content
(or as much as possible) the published Ubuntu EC2 images.

Scott