Home / server / Questions / 310370
Accepted
Stann
Asked: 2011-09-12 18:15:43 +0800 CST

Confused about what Amazon EC2 image (AMI) to use for CentOS

  • 772

I use Fedora as my home machine and thus wanted to use Centos 6.0 linux as amazon EC2 instance. Here is the thing though - Amazon gives you long list of very unscientifically sorted instances, some of them as I understand Centos 6.0:

158864314994/mesos-hypertable-centos-6 944964708905/rightimage_centos_6.0_i386_20110810.1_ebs 944964708905/rightimage_centos_6.0_86x64_20110810.1_ebs 452552107804/Bayscribe-SearchServer2-CentOS6-EBS_9-8 452552107804/Bayscribe-SearchServer2-CentOS6-EBS_9-9

or something like this.

What do I have to do to get my beloved standard minimal netinstall of Centos 6.0?

Does Amazon maintains official images? because how do I know if these 3-rd party images don't contain some malicious crap?

linux centos amazon-ec2

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The official "Amazon Linux" AMIs are binary compatible with CentOS (presumably they are based on CentOS) so should be very familiar to you if that is your preferred distro.

    A few trusted third parties like RightScale also publish CentOS AMIs.

    You are correct to not trust random AMIs found in the general list. Always start at the site of a trusted AMI publisher to get the AMI id. Just because an AMI says "rightimage" doesn't mean it was published by RightScale.

    Affiliation disclosure: RightScale sponsors my personal tech blog, http://Alestic.com

    • 4

  2. Yes, they maintain official images and it's recommended to use them unless you know the source is a reputable provider. Here is the link to browse their official images.

    UPDATE: Sorry, I misread your question as to what you meant by official images. One suggestion might be to make your own AMI from a local VirtualBox or VMWare instance, there is some documentation here.

    • 1