[ec2-beta] Private vs. Public Instances

[Mark Shuttleworth]

Chuck Short wrote:
> We were talking about this today and there is possibly to query a page 
> using curl with the latest versions for
> the AMI id so people will always use the latest AMI ids. Also we could 
> have a little script in the AMI to notify
> that users that the latest AMI are available.
>   

Thanks Eric, Chuck.

For the moment, I think we should make this a feature of our own EC2
scripts and tools, thought it would be important to ensure that the WS
callout never blocks or DOS's the ability to launch an AMI. For example,
cacheing or hardcoding the "last known good" AMI and using that if the
call to resolve the indirection fails, would be OK.

As I understand it, our plan of record in the longer term is to offer
two AMI's for each release:

  Ubuntu-X.YY-release (an AMI of the bits as at release day, modulo
point releases and obscenely critical updates)
  Ubuntu-X.YY-with-updates (an AMI that includes all the updates as of
yesterday, say).

The latter is of course the most useful candidate for redirection.

Then, we would have a standard way to "up shift from the base AMI to a
standard profile of packages and configuration". This latter piece is as
yet undefined, though the Landscape folks have done some work on it, as
have RightScale. It is also of course futurism and not beta-programism :-)

Mark
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