On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 01:28:12PM -0800, Eric Hammond wrote: > There is no single place that people go to find AMI ids, and there > are dozens of ways that people run AMIs on EC2 once they find the > ids. Thanks for your feedback, and let me repeat here what I mentioned yesterday on IRC: thanks a lot for your work on providing Debian AMI in the past. I've always appreciated it and I'd be glad if you'd join this list sharing your experience and/or your code (as, in fact, you've just done :-)). > You need to make sure you are putting the official AMI ids in as > many places as you can including: > > - The official Debian web site That is planned. But it is also a bit of chicken-n-egg. We need to define what is the authoritative source for the current AMI ids; once we have that we can publish the info in a number of places. > - EC2 Quick Start list on AWS console This is on the table too: see the last exchange between me and James on the matter. I was hoping that was quicker/easier to obtain, we'll see… > - AWS Marketplace (I doubt this is popular yet) Done. > - A machine-queriable API that returns the latest AMI ids The JSON format you mentioned looks reasonable. However, this brings us back to the infrastructure question: we'll need to host a corresponding CGI (or whatever it is that implements the query service) somewhere. Where? Alioth comes to mind, as we can host CGIs there http://wiki.debian.org/Alioth/Web Is that argument enough to convince people who were concerned about using Alioth to do so? Of course having Alioth does not imply that people will _have to_ use it for package hosting too, but once we have the project I guess it will _probably_ happen. > - Other places that show up when people search for them on Google > > Since I published a series of popular Debian community AMIs back in > 2008-2010, my web site Alestic.com became known as the place to find > the AMI ids. > > Alestic.com still shows up towards the top of Google searches like > [debian ec2] and [debian ami] and [official debian amis] even though > I don't say "Debian" except to point folks to the current community > AMI page. Right, and thanks for pointing to http://wiki.debian.org/Cloud/AmazonEC2Image from your page. > If Debian provides a query API with the latest AMIs, I'd be happy to > list them on Alestic.com so folks looking for them can find and run > them. Thanks for the offer! Let's see where we go with the hosting discussion and then we'll get back to you about this. In the meantime it would be nice if you could point to the above wiki page *before* selecting an entry from the Ubuntu AMI drop down. I suspect that people ending up on your page when looking for "debian ami" will search for "debian" in the page as the first thing, and right now that gives no result. Obviously this is no big deal, if it's annoying for you to implement never mind, we can delay this to when the query service is ready. > A lot of experience releasing AMIs has gone into creating this > definition, so I'd recommend adopting this standard if you can. Out of curiosity: do you know of any other distro who has implemented it already? If not, it might be worth to advertise the format on some cross-distro mailing list, like <distributions@lists.freedesktop.org>. Cheers. -- Stefano Zacchiroli . . . . . . . zack@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o Debian Project Leader . . . . . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o . « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »
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