Reading archives..
So I am a long time user of EC2 (since 2008), and wanted to give some
feedback on some of the questions being raised, and some additional
thoughts. Please forgive me if I missed any emails in the threads:
1) default user. There is no standard across distros. For example:
Ubuntu -> ubuntu
RHEL -> root (violates the Amazon recommendation, but follows RHEL standards)
Amazon Linux (CentOS based) -> ec2-user
I like "debian" as initially proposed.
(This user needs to accept and install the ssh public key handed by
Amazon API as part of spinup process, and of course password login
should be disabled)
2) Retention of AMIs.
Generally there is an expectation that "Official" Public AMIs will
not go away, as people bake these things into highly automated
infrastructures. I see we are discussing a purging policy, I would be
very careful here. (One should stop advertising the depricated AMIs,
but generally they should be kept available for those users that have
them baked into their automation.)
3) Very happy to see cloud-init support being added to Debian
4) Are we going to be adding the ec2 cli tools to the AMIs? or at
least packaging them to make it easier to install?
A full list with locations can be found here:
http://alestic.com/2012/09/aws-command-line-tools
5) Same question for the cfn-helper tools? (Cloudformation helper)
Currently I install like so, but packaging it and baking it
into the AMI would be great:
apt-get -y install python-setuptools
easy_install
https://s3.amazonaws.com/cloudformation-examples/aws-cfn-bootstrap-1.0-6.tar.gz
6) Now that EC2 supports overriding the default root EBS volume size,
doing a conditional resize2fs upon boot is incredibly useful.
7) So in addition to 32 bit EBS and 64 bit EBS we are going to want to
maintain a number of other permutations in each region. Full list:
- 32-bit instance store
- 64-bit instance store
- 32-bit PVM EBS
- 64-bit PVM EBS
- 64-bit HVM EBS (For cluster nodes, which are currently only
available in us-east)
8) AWS services change during the life of a stable release, I believe
we are going to have to consider how to allow some EC2 specific
packages to get updated beyond just security patches.
9) Not sure I understand the security issue that required the AMIs to
be pulled. Is there an explanation somewhere that I missed?
10) Gonna take a little while to get this right.. Please don't rush to
label them as "Official", as once you do, you lose quite a bit of
flexibility when it comes to users' expectations.
11) At some point, we may want to consider running repos inside of the
AWS cloud.
If I have time I'll try to do some testing this weekend. (No promises.)
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