Amazon’s EC2 service is great for being able to roll out new servers quickly and easily. It’s also really nice because we don’t ever have to worry about physical hardware and can just spin up more instances as we need them for experimenting or whatever.
Unfortunately, they’re still stuck in the dark ages with the newest AMIs available for Fedora being Fedora 8 based. With Fedora 12 around the corner, that’s two years old — something of an eternity in the pace of distribution development. I’d love to help out and build newer images, but while anyone can publish an AMI and make it public, you can’t publish newer kernel images, which really would be needed to use the newer system.
So, if you’re reading this at Amazon or know of someone I can talk with to try to move this forward, please let me know (katzj AT fedoraproject DOT org). I’d really strongly prefer to continue with Fedora and RHEL based images for our systems as opposed to starting to spin up Ubuntu images for the obvious reasons of familiarity.
I feel the same pain, Jeremy. Can you help me understand the implications of this? I’m new to Linux, just getting together a Java-based web application, which I want to deploy on Amazon EC2. Having seen that Amazon’s own AMI’s favour Fedora, I bought some books on Fedora and started learning it. I am dismayed to read that Amazon EC2 is so far behind in terms of the Fedora upgrade cycle.
What do you advise? Should I persist with Fedora, and learn how to prepare a Fedora 12 AMI from scratch? Should I instead jump on the Ubunto band-wagon?
Check out http://www.ioncannon.net/system-administration/894/fedora-12-bootable-root-ebs-on-ec2/ for a workaround.
dpinn — there’s work underway in the Fedora Cloud SIG (https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/cloud) to get new kernels and images available, hopefully by the release of Fedora 13 if not sooner.
Darrell — this isn’t a real solution as you’re still running the ancient kernel which means that some functionality acts “weird” at best.