A new RightScale CentOS5 base image (RightImage) is available: RightImage CentOS V1_10 ami-08f41161, please see the changelog for the details of what has changed. We also try to keep the Public AMI listing on Amazon’s site up-to-date.

A little background on RightImages: to configure servers we use a base image and install software at boot time using our server templates and RightScripts. This is way more modular and maintainable than baking entire servers into AMIs. Please see our blog post on the rationale behind this. As a result, we produce base images that are small yet have all the software utilities one just needs in EC2 already installed, from the Amazon EC2 tools to traceroute, curl, wget, etc. The second innovation we made with our images is that they are fully scripted and we publish the script. You can launch Amazon’s FC4 image, run our script, and out pops a clone of our RightImage. So if you want to see what we install or make some changes you can go right ahead.

Note that an Ubuntu 7.04 RightImage should be available soon. We’re not sure how much support for Ubuntu we can realistically provide, but we’ll at least have a base image and be able to run RightScripts.

Archived Comments

Jon
Great! Keep them coming. Even if I don’t wind up using the image itself, the ideas from the rightscripts are valuable of their own accord.
Thanks! Jon

Thorsten
Thanks for the encouragement Jon! Let us know what prevents you from using the images themselves

Jean-Marc
It’s good to hear about an Ubuntu RightImage but why not a Debian one instead ?

Thorsten
Debian vs. ubuntu… We had to pick one, somehow… But don’t worry, we will publish the script to generate the image so you should be able to easily modify it to generate a Debian image.

kogent
fyi – keep in mind that ubuntu 7.10 is due out in about 2 weeks.

Thorsten
Kogent – Fortunately it will be easy to re-run the script that creates the image for 7.10. I’m sure there will be some tweaks necessary, but the hard work is getting any Ubuntu installed properly.

Jon
“Thanks for the encouragement Jon! Let us know what prevents you from using the images themselves ”
On second thought, maybe I will try the CentOS5 image. I’ll let you know how it goes.
-Jon