I think Amazon Web Services is superb. We’re doing a lot of new customer deployments to it, and for creating a scalable, highly available infrastructure there’s really nothing that can match it.
But for a lot of our use cases Amazon Linux doesn’t really fit. We don’t want new versions of packages every six months, we want to set something up and be confident that it’ll continue working with backported security fixes for several years.
To fill that need, I’ve created Amazon Machine Images for CentOS 6. There were already some public images out there, but they all seemed to be pretty hacky in nature – random repositories enabled, random extra packages installed, no instance based swap etc etc.
These images are as close to a minimal CentOS 6 install as I think makes sense on AWS – CentOS6, with cloud-init and ec2-utils. Ephemeral storage will be mounted under /media/ephemeral0, swap will be mounted too. The EBS backed images include a small amount (~256MB) of swap to make them more useful on t1.micro – to disable this just run ‘swapoff LABEL=ebs-swap’.
I’ll be writing a separate blog post detailing how these images were created, and how you can create your own in the next few days.
Log in with the username ‘ec2-user’, using your SSH keypair. You’ll have full sudo access without a password.
| Region | EBS-Backed (32-bit) | EBS-Backed (64-bit) | Instance Store (32-bit) | Instance Store (64-bit) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| eu-west-1 | ami-bda09ec9 | ami-afa09edb | ami-7fa09e0b | ami-1ba09e6f |
| us-east-1 | ami-94cf1cfd | ami-eece1d87 | ami-62cd1e0b | ami-3ecd1e57 |
| us-west-2 | ami-c80d80f8 | ami-c00d80f0 | ami-e20d80d2 | ami-c473fef4 |
10 Comments for CentOS 6.2 EC2 AMI
Jack Murgia | February 16, 2012 at 6:35 am
DP | February 19, 2012 at 7:56 am
What’s the correct way to create a 20GB partition? -b “/dev/sda=snap-e8d2a18f:20:false” creates /dev/xvde at 5GB. I was unsuccessful in attaching it to a second instance as parted parted support resizing ext4.
Author comment by sam | February 21, 2012 at 10:36 am
@DP: The easiest way would be to just rebuild with the ec2-bundle-vol utility – see http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonEC2/dg/2006-06-26/creating-an-ami.html
Jack Murgia | February 21, 2012 at 6:45 pm
It looks like these have been deregistered and are no longer available. For those of us that have bundled our own AMI from these, is there anything we should be concerned about?
Author comment by sam | February 28, 2012 at 10:30 am
Jack: These should all still be available, they’ve not been de-registered. I’m about to post an update with the latest kernel though.
Michael Duffy | March 15, 2012 at 8:22 am
Excellent set of AMI’s, exactly what I was looking for; clean, minimal and well put together. many thanks for sharing!
Bill | March 17, 2012 at 3:56 pm
Thank you for these instances. I would like to use WinScp as a root but was unable to configure the instance to do so. Can you provide any suggestions?
Steven Lambert | April 6, 2012 at 10:47 pm
Any plans for an hvm virtualized AMI for 6.2?
alex | April 20, 2012 at 7:39 pm
Hi,
I’m confused about /dev/sda3 (xvde3) partition which is swap
I can’t find it in the sda partition table …
how it appears in the OS?
Gio Arteaga | April 27, 2012 at 3:55 pm
Hey man, this is great! I have one quick question though, I’m using a micro instance with this. How do I increase the swap size to 384mb or up to 512mb? I have no problem mounting a small ebs volume to accomplish this.
You rock!
The best set of free public AMIs I seen released in a while- a clean, user-data filed compatible CentOS has been sorely lacking- and while I love Ubuntu- sometimes you just have to have a CentOS box! Thanks for saving the rest of us a lot of time, Sam.