[ec2-beta] some feedback on the i386 image

[Mark Shuttleworth]

Eric Hammond wrote:
> Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
>   
>> Surely the command to "setup an ec2 instance" would be run from the
>> users Ubuntu workstation, and that could ssh in to the instance and
>> set the password
>>     
>
> It's not quite that simple with EC2.  A good percentage of the people
> running Ubuntu on EC2 are using Windows, Macs, and other non-Ubuntu
> operating systems on their desktops.
>
> Also, since AWS is implemented entirely as a set of web APIs, there are
> many different ways to run instances on EC2.  Requiring users of the
> Ubuntu AMIs to use a particular toolset would not be the best way to get
> widespread usage.
>
> I currently use 5 distinct ways to run EC2 instances and none of them
> provide hooks to customize the external startup method even though I'm
> personally running Ubuntu:
>
> 1. ec2-run-instances command, written in Java and provided by Amazon
>
> 2. My own custom programs, written in Perl directly using the EC2 API
>
> 3. The EC2 Firefox plugin, written in JavaScript and run in the browser
>
> 4. The Amazon AWS console, which is a web site
>
> 5. RightScale, another web service with advanced configuration and
>    management capabilities.
>
> and I regularly test other methods.
>   
Regardless, there are only two pieces of information that we need to
deliver to the instance:

 - the user name
 - the crypted, or digested, password

We can easily set it up so that EACH of the mechanisms you describe, and
others, deliver that data to something in the standard base image which
uses it to get the right result.

Mark


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/private/ec2/attachments/20090114/b9754ac6/attachment-0002.htm