Re: [atomic-devel] EC2 PV/HVM AMIs

[Andy Grimm <agrimm gmail com>]

On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 8:08 AM, Dusty Mabe <dustymabe gmail com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I was looking to create an image for amazon EC2 and ran across [1].
> Has anyone made any progress here? If not I have some experience
> dealing with AMIs and could make paravirt/HVM images that could then
> be advertised.

I have loaded a RHEL atomic image into EC2 as HVM, and it works fine.
So generating CentOS or Fedora HVM images should be no problem.

The only  issue with making a paravirtualized atomic image is that we
don't currently generate the required grub.conf file as part of our
image build.  It would be trivial to do so (the Fedora cloud-base
kickstart has code for it that could be reused); it just wasn't a
priority.

One reason that it has not been a priority is that debugging a
paravirtualized instance in EC2 is much more difficult than an HVM
instance (things like sysrq commands don't work, for example), so we
generally prefer to run HVM.  That doesn't mean we can't create
paravirt images, though.

> One question I do have is: Does the answer from [2] still apply? If so
> then maybe making an image isn't what atomic wants to do?

This is techinically correct, but perhaps I can make it more clear.
Joe's response was that project atomic would not "own" any images
produced.  Images *will* be produced by Fedora, and probably CentOS as
well (and some of the same people will probably be involved), but it
makes sense for the distros to own the image production process and
the resulting artifacts.

Andy

>
> - Dusty
>
> [1] http://ask.projectatomic.io/en/question/102/amiparavirtualized-ec2-support/
> [2] http://ask.projectatomic.io/en/question/10/will-project-atomic-be-publishing-any-host-images-of-its-own/#11
>