[CentOS] Adding an 'official' CentOS image to the Amazon EC2 (Electronic Compute Cloud)
Michael A. Peters
mpeters at mac.com
Thu May 7 05:11:07 UTC 2009
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.
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