[ec2-beta] Ubuntu Image Differences

[Ramprasad Prabhakar]

Eric

Thanks for the detailed explanation.

As someone who might be interested in moving to EC2 on an enterprise  
level, Fedora 8 did not gel well, considering the EOL.

I was hoping that the official AMI would be the LTS version (so I dont  
have to worry about support for my AWS instances for few years). In  
such a scenario, what distribution (alestic vs official/LTS vs  
Intrepid) would you suggest ?

- Ram
On Feb 6, 2009, at 9:50 PM, Eric Hammond wrote:

> Keith:
>
> I will eventually publish a list of all of the specific differences
> between the AMIs on http://alestic.com and the official Ubuntu AMIs,  
> but
> the official beta is still in flux, in some ways moving closer to  
> what I
> publish and some ways taking a different approach.
>
> To me the biggest difference is that the official Ubuntu AMIs will  
> have
> the word "official" in front of them :)  I believe this is a good  
> thing
> which will increase the trust level and help promote the use of Ubuntu
> on EC2.
>
> From a technical perspective, the most important improvement in the  
> beta
> is that it defaults to a more modern and appropriate kernel version
> (which is part of this beta).  Before this, we were only able to run
> against the kernels published by Amazon, but Canonical has worked  
> out a
> relationship which lets them build custom Ubuntu kernels for EC2 (and
> has put in the hard work to build them).
>
> Insofar as I continue publishing community AMIs after the official
> public release, I expect to use the new official kernels with the
> unofficial AMIs.
>
> Other things you might want to know if you've been using the Ubuntu
> images on http://alestic.com and want to test the official beta images
> include:
>
> - beta1 does not have the EC2 AMI tools installed, but beta2 will.
>
> - beta1 has a manual tasksel prompt on first ssh, but beta2 will not.
>
> - beta1 lets you ssh in as root, but beta2 will restrict it to the
> "ubuntu" user by default (with appropriate sudo privs) following the
> Ubuntu security conventions.
>
> - The user-data startup script does not work in beta1 but will in  
> beta2.
>
> - There are a few minor package differences between the AMIs on
> http://alestic.com and the official beta AMIs, but these are again a  
> bit
> in flux and you can easily install any you find to be missing.
>
> - The beta only supports Intrepid server.
>
> I expect to eventually phase out support for many of the community  
> AMIs
> I build in favor of the official Ubuntu images, though this could  
> take a
> long time as I'm currently fond of Hardy LTS which is not in the
> official beta.
>
> Please do try out the official beta images and provide feedback.
> Canonical has generously included me in the early process and I feel
> like I've been able to help a bit, but the more eyes, environments,  
> and
> uses the better.
>
> --
> Eric Hammond
> ehammond at thinksome.com
>
>
>
> Keith Cerny wrote:
>> Forgive me if this question has already been asked as I am a new  
>> member
>> of the beta list.
>>
>> We currently use the Ubuntu images created by Eric Hammond
>> (http://alestic.com) for our EC2 Ubuntu servers. How will the images
>> provided through this beta program differ from those created by  
>> Alestic?
>> Are there any specific gotchas or shortcomings with using the  
>> existing
>> Alestic images that the beta program is looking to address?
>>
>> We will spin up a beta image and try our configuration on it and  
>> let you
>> know if it works well.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Keith
>>
>
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