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
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.
On Wed, May 06, 2009 at 10:11:07PM -0700, Michael A. Peters wrote:
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).
Linode now do CentOS 5.2, both i386 and x86_64, according to this:
Cheers, Gavin
I don't know if it's xen under the hood or not (not much experience with this sort of thing). However, 'xen' is mentioned in the following link which I'm following so perhaps it is xen related: http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/2009-03-01/DeveloperGuide/index.htm...
I'm not all the way through this link so I can't vouch for it's utility but it's good thus far.
Jason
Jason Aubrey wrote:
I don't know if it's xen under the hood or not (not much experience with this sort of thing). However, 'xen' is mentioned in the following link which I'm following so perhaps it is xen related: http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/2009-03-01/DeveloperGuide/index.htm...
fromw hat I can tell, they are just creating a temp yum repo conf file to specify what repos to install from and calling it |yum-xen.conf for some reason. they then use that .conf file with yum like... |
||*|yum -c /|<yum_configuration_file>|/ --installroot=/|<image_mountpoint>|/ -y groupinstall Base
and install the 'base' group to the loopback mount, which populates the file system image.
|*
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
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
On 07/05/2009, Karanbir Singh mail-lists@karan.org wrote:
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.
yeah, we played around with it for a while and still use it for the occasional demo. It is a bit of a chore creating a machine image form one of your servers but once it is done then that is that. -unless your image is using one of the public ip addresses that has made it onto a blacklist. We find the s3 file storage and cloudfront content delivery service much more useful.
mike
So, unless they are happy to come back and start talking to us again I highly recommend everyone not bother using EC2.
- KB
I had the exact same experience when trying to get a sales rep to talk to me about hosting an application for my company. We need to know that someone will be there to pick up the phone when there are problems, and I couldn't get anyone to call me back to answer my questions. I guess Amazon doesn't care too much about the customer service end of AWS. We'd feel a lot more confident about putting our application onto their cloud if someone would at least return my phone calls and emails. So not too surprising that they gave you the brush-off, given that they won't even call back a customer with dollars in hand, ready to spend.
-----Original Message----- From: centos-bounces@centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces@centos.org] On Behalf Of Sean Carolan Sent: Thursday, May 07, 2009 11:06 To: CentOS mailing list Subject: Re: [CentOS] Adding an 'official' CentOS image to the Amazon EC2(Electronic Compute Cloud)
So, unless they are happy to come back and start talking to
us again I
highly recommend everyone not bother using EC2.
- KB
I had the exact same experience when trying to get a sales rep to talk to me about hosting an application for my company. We need to know that someone will be there to pick up the phone when there are problems, and I couldn't get anyone to call me back to answer my questions. I guess Amazon doesn't care too much about the customer service end of AWS. We'd feel a lot more confident about putting our application onto their cloud if someone would at least return my phone calls and emails. So not too surprising that they gave you the brush-off, given that they won't even call back a customer with dollars in hand, ready to spend.
Quoting from their website:
"Inexpensive - Amazon EC2 passes on to you the financial benefits of Amazon's scale. You pay a very low rate for the compute capacity you actually consume."
Remember, these are surplus resources that would otherwise be cost of doing business.
CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
-- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- - - - Jason Pyeron PD Inc. http://www.pdinc.us - - Principal Consultant 10 West 24th Street #100 - - +1 (443) 269-1555 x333 Baltimore, Maryland 21218 - - - -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- This message is copyright PD Inc, subject to license 20080407P00.
Jason Pyeron wrote:
"Inexpensive - Amazon EC2 passes on to you the financial benefits of Amazon's scale. You pay a very low rate for the compute capacity you actually consume."
Which is kinda funny since it's not true in many situations. My company did a cost analysis of using the Amazon cloud vs doing it ourselves, and the cloud cost at Amazon was more than double what we would pay if we did it ourselves(TCO over a 3 year period). And that's just the cost of the services themselves.
We do need hundreds of megabits of internet bandwidth, and lots of CPU cycles as well as I/O cycles(and disk space), in the micro pay model that Amazon has it adds up fast.. I'm sure it's more cost effective if the stuff your doing sits idle most of the time.
We also priced out a premium enterprise provider that used VMware enterprise and they came in at about 4x the cost of doing it ourselves, CPU cycles in VMware enterprise are of course a lot more expensive than non-vmware or even VMware foundation.
The premium enterprise VMWare vendor(Terremark) came within about $15k of the cost of using Rackspace managed hosting(bare metal) to do the same over a 3 year period which I thought was very interesting, shows how expensive managed hosting can be as well(we weren't looking for much software on hands support but rather hardware support, leasing the equipment through them etc).
So not surprisingly we're doing it ourselves, which makes me happy as an infrastructure guy. Building new sites and setting up new things is something that keeps me happy.
I interviewed some guy for an operations position last week who was proud of the fact they had migrated to the cloud, and it was working great. Then I asked him what kind of traffic do they get and how many servers? They got something like 10,000 requests a DAY, and they had 2 or 3 servers. Big whoop!
nate
I don't have much experience with AWS yet, so I can't speak to any support issues. We're looking at leveraging it for automated builds initially (occasional up time) for proprietary and open source projects.
For making an image public, it would obviously be great if Amazon would sponsor the image... However, if this isn't the case maybe centos.org could publish an image identifier(s) on their website and then have it labeled 'public' on the AWS console. Each image has a unique identifier used to instantiate it, so as long as centos.org publishes approved ids then that would be a pretty good work around in my opinion.
Jason Aubrey
Jason Aubrey wrote:
For making an image public, it would obviously be great if Amazon would sponsor the image...
You are missing the point, imho. I think the real issue, for me anyway, is that Amazon is actively discouraging what is essentially a community, in spite of the fact that they and many of their users rely on the community to get things done, both work and play.
However, if this isn't the case maybe centos.org could publish an image identifier(s) on their website and then have it labeled 'public' on the AWS console.
Well, what is centos.org ? Why dont you go ahead and document the build process, and I can plumb that into the distro-build scripts.
Each image has a unique identifier used to instantiate it, so as long as centos.org publishes approved ids then that would be a pretty good work around in my opinion.
workaround to what ? Amazon being hostile to open source projects ?
- KB
Why dont you go ahead and document the build process, and I can plumb that into the distro-build scripts.
That's a great idea - it was my intention. However, I've been unsuccessful thus far. I was able to create an image that booted but I was unable to ssh to the box afterwards... Someone with more Linux or Xen experience may have more success with it. Unfortunately, I've run out of time to pursue it on this project. I hate throwing in the towel... grr.
Right Scale publishes some 5.2 CentOS images on Amazon so I've decided to use one of those as a base image.
workaround to what ? Amazon being hostile to open source projects ?
Yeah.
You are missing the point, imho. I think the real issue, for me anyway, is that Amazon is actively discouraging what is essentially a community, in spite of the fact that they and many of their users rely on the community to get things done, both work and play.
Indeed. The entire infrastructure is built on Linux and Xen virtual machines. One would think they'd be a bit more friendly and communicative to the CentOS organization.
-
Gavin Carr -
Jason Aubrey -
Jason Pyeron -
John R Pierce -
Karanbir Singh -
Michael A. Peters -
Michael Simpson -
nate -
Ralph Angenendt -
Sean Carolan