[ec2-beta] Private vs. Public Instances

[Eric Hammond]

Mark:

EC2 does not currently provide that level of indirection at the web service level, which is where it belongs.

The EC2 web service API requires an AMI id to start an instance and there is no way to change the image associated with an existing AMI id.  Each AMI uploaded and registered gets a new id.

It would be possible to add the layer of indirection at a client level, but since there are many AWS clients with support for EC2, each one would have to add the support individually and they are not likely to until the feature is in the EC2 API.

I think I'm one of the few or only  AMI providers who regularly releases updated AMIs in a "series".

For example, Amazon released a Fedora 8 AMI and didn't even update it when it was found to have a bug preventing easy rebundling.

I believe it should be made possible for a user to request either a specific AMI or the AMI referred to by a symbolic name, depending on their development and release cycle and their level of trust in an AMI provider.

--
Eric Hammond
http://www.anvilon.com


-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Shuttleworth <mark at ubuntu.com>
Date: Monday, Mar 9, 2009 4:36 am
Subject: Re: [ec2-beta] Private vs. Public Instances
To: ec2-beta at lists.ubuntu.com

Eric Hammond wrote:
>   However, I can say from personal experience that it is a pain to keep updating these documents manually with the latest information every time a new AMI is released.

Is there a way to add a layer of indirection on AMI's? For example, is there a way to say "fire up the latest version of the Ubuntu-9.04-for-EC2 AMI"? Or "fire up the today's version of Ubuntu-9.04-for-EC2-with-updates-applied"?

Mark