CentOS - May 2009 - Adding an 'official' CentOS image to the Amazon EC2 (Electronic Compute Cloud)

I'm starting to use the EC2 cloud (as are others) and noticed that all
the available CentOS images seem to be of dubious origin.
I think it would further the reputation and popularity of CentOS if it
were represented in an official way.

In case people aren't aware, when you create an AWS (Amazon Web
Services) account there's a management console that shows a list of
available images.  Of this list, some are published by Amazon, others
are uploaded anonymously, or you can upload your own.  Given the
dubious nature of an anonymous image and a lack of an Amazon image for
CentOS, I'm left in the third camp - creating/bundling/uploading my
own.  Luckily I have the required 64 bit hardware to generate a 64 bit
image!  Selfishly I'd love to just start up an existing image
published by centos.org but one's not available.

Interestingly one is available from Amazon for both Fedora and Windows.

Jason

> Interestingly one is available from Amazon for both Fedora and Windows.
I would also like to see a plain vanilla, minimal 64 bit centos image
on Amazon AWS.

Jason Aubrey wrote:
> I'm starting to use the EC2 cloud (as are others) and noticed that all
> the available CentOS images seem to be of dubious origin.
> I think it would further the reputation and popularity of CentOS if it
> were represented in an official way.
> 
> In case people aren't aware, when you create an AWS (Amazon Web
> Services) account there's a management console that shows a list of
> available images.  Of this list, some are published by Amazon, others
> are uploaded anonymously, or you can upload your own.
I haven't heard of it before. It looks interesting.
Is it basically a xen, or is it it's own environment?

I run CentOS inside a xen at linode - they have a 5.0 image and I 
believe a 4.x image. They only have i386, I don't know if a home brewed 
x86_64 image would work but it doesn't really matter for me since I'm 
only using my instance as a web server (fully updated to 5.3, and 
customized with EPEL and my own php build).

Anyway, I suspect xen (or similar) virtual machines are soon to be the 
standard way non-managed web serving accounts with shell access is done.

My previous host - the people were good, I requested some perl / tcl 
modules and they were installed, but then when they upgraded the OS my 
site broke and I had to request them again. Then they changed server 
operating systems (a good move - they were running a bleeding edge 
distro and they moved to debian stable) the uid/gid of apache changed 
and they didn't use the old uid/gid breaking apache write permission and 
I could not run chown myself so I had to file a ticket, etc. - with xen 
virtual machines, I never have to file a request ticket as I have root 
so it is better both for me and the hosting company and it is 
inexpensive enough that it undoubtedly will soon be the standard way 
anything more than basic web hosting and less than managed web hosting 
is done.

To get to my point, I think it would thus be beneficial for CentOS to 
produce an official virtual machine image for servers that providers can 
use and/or users can upload and use on providers that don't offer a 
CentOS image.

It should be a small image with basically just the server install, once 
running in xen users can yum install whatever they need to their hearts 
content.

I don't know who created the image linode uses, it was missing some 
stuff a server should have (IE screen and alpine, though alpine I 
believe is EPEL and not rhel/centos) but was missing very little and was 
a very complete basic server.

Jason Aubrey wrote:
> In case people aren't aware, when you create an AWS (Amazon Web
> Services) account there's a management console that shows a list of
> available images.  Of this list, some are published by Amazon, others
> are uploaded anonymously, or you can upload your own.  Given the
> dubious nature of an anonymous image and a lack of an Amazon image for
> CentOS, I'm left in the third camp - creating/bundling/uploading my
> own.  Luckily I have the required 64 bit hardware to generate a 64 bit
> image!  Selfishly I'd love to just start up an existing image
> published by centos.org but one's not available.
Do you have an idea of what is exspected/needs to be done to create such
an image?

Ralph
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Jason Aubrey wrote:
> I'm starting to use the EC2 cloud (as are others) and noticed that all
> the available CentOS images seem to be of dubious origin.
> I think it would further the reputation and popularity of CentOS if it
> were represented in an official way.
I started talking to Amazon about this a long time back ( early Feb 2008 
  - refer to posts on the centos-virt list ) and was quite interested in 
making things easier for people who might want to use CentOS images on 
EC2 - and their response at the time was semi-warm. After a few emails 
to and fro, I even agreed ( against usual principles ) to sign a NDA 
that they sent over so that we could move the situation forward. 
However, their continued attitude to the issue amounted to : go away, we 
dont care about you so stop wasting our time. Another way to interpret 
it is : give us loads of money and we'll talk to you, till then, stop 
wasting our time.

So, unless they are happy to come back and start talking to us again I 
highly recommend everyone not bother using EC2.

- KB