Official Ubuntu Amazon EC2 AMIs

Ubuntu released official images for Amazon EC2 for Intrepid (8.10) and Hardy (8.04) releases (not Jaunty image yet). These are server edition images. I’ve always used the great alestic ec2 images created by Eric Hammond for any Ubuntu or Debian release I needed in the past and was very happy with the quality of the images Eric maintained. This was also seen by the Ubuntu team and they worked with Eric to create their official images with the same quality and most of the features of what most people were used for Ubuntu images so far in EC2 world.

In my opinion here are the advantages of the newly released official Ubuntu images:

• officially support by Canonical (Eric has done a great job in patching and updating his images, but I am sure he has better things to do and let the Ubuntu team do this).
• custom kernels: for Intrepid 2.6.27 and Hardy 2.6.24 by having Amazon support in doing this (while alestic images were using the default Amazon Fedora kernel 2.6.21 image).
• apt mirrors in the ec2 cloud provided by Ubuntu: us.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com and eu.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com
• RightScale support for advanced integration with the RightScale platform for RightScale users.

Starting a default small instance Intrepid US image (check for the current AMI Ids):

ec2-run-instances ami-5059be39 -k my-keypair
ec2-describe-instances
ssh -i .ec2/id_rsa-my-keypair ubuntu@ec2-x-x-x-x.compute-1.amazonaws.com
sudo su -

Note: you have to login as ubuntu user and sudo as root.

Don’t forget to shutdown your instances when you are done, to avoid unneeded charges ;) .

For more details: http://www.ubuntu.com/ec2