Public EBS Boot AMIs for Ubuntu on Amazon EC2

If you’ve been following along, you probably know that I have been recommending that folks using EC2 switch to the official Ubuntu AMIs published by Canonical (Hardy or Karmic). I have been building and publishing Ubuntu AMIs since 2007 (including Dapper, Edgy, Feisty, Gutsy, Hardy, Intrepid, Karmic), but the last year my focus on this project has been to transition these responsibilities to Canonical who have more time and resources to support the initiative.

I’m happy to say that I’ve finally followed my own advice. For my personal Amazon EC2 servers (including for the Alestic.com web site) I am using Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic images published for EC2 by Canonical.

While I was making the transition, I also switched to EBS boot AMIs. However, since it sounds like Canonical is not planning to publish EBS boot AMIs until Lucid, I decided to continue in service to the community and make available EBS boot AMIs for running Ubuntu on EC2.

I have published EBS boot AMIs for Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic and Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy, both 32- and 64-bit architectures, in all current EC2 regions, for a total of a dozen new AMIs.

I chose to use the exact Ubuntu images which Canonical built for running Ubuntu on EC2. This means that these EBS boot AMIs work exactly the same as the official Canonical AMIs including ssh to the ubuntu user. Again, even though I’m publishing the EBS boot AMIs for Karmic and Hardy, the contents of the image were built by Canonical.

The EBS boot AMIs are listed on Alestic.com. I have restructured the table to better feature Canonical AMIs, and now you need to pick an EC2 region to see the IDs.

Give the EBS boot AMIs a spin and let me know if you run into any issues.