Ubunutu 11.04 Natty Narwhal is released, and there’s something in it for RightScale users!

We’ve been working with our partners at Canonical to make it possible to use Ubuntu AMIs out of the box with RightScale. This means you can start playing with Natty Narwhal 11.04 in RightScale today!

How does it work?

The method was pioneered by Eric Hammond, who helps maintain Ubuntu and Debian AMIs for EC2 along with Scott Moser. An AMI is setup to fetch the user-data when an EC2 instance launches, and execute any scripts delineated by a special format. Canonical has incorporated this into the Ubuntu releases as their cloud-init software.

In the latest Natty Narwhal 11.04 release, RightScale’s RightLink software is now compatible with the Canonical cloud-init. Furthermore, Canonical’s officially supported AMIs for Natty Narwhal 11.04 are capable of configuring RightLink automatically.

We’ve created the following MultiCloud Images supporting all AWS regions:

• RightImage_OSS_Ubuntu_11.04_i386_v5.6.28
• RightImage_OSS_Ubuntu_11.04_x64_v5.6.28
• RightImage_OSS_Ubuntu_11.04_i386_v5.6.28_EBS
• RightImage_OSS_Ubuntu_11.04_x64_v5.6.28_EBS
• RightImage_OSS_Ubuntu_11.04_x64_v5.6.28_HVM

We’re sure this will benefit Ubuntu customers and partners, and we hope this method becomes more widely adopted by other virtual machine image creators.

Our hats off to the Ubuntu community for your continued advances in the cloud.