This last spring I blogged about creating gentoo images for ec2. Since then I have evolved it into a project and added portage tools and Puppet to the mix. You can find the project over at github.com. Basically I now use Puppet to bootstrap and configure servers from scratch for ec2, including completely optimizing the entire opperating system for the image-type @ ec2.
After the image is created you can use puppet on-going to maintain your instances at EC2. Puppet is a great tool for unix server management. The combination of Gentoo (my fav) with EC2 (another fav) and automation is awesome.
Even if you just want to use gentoo and don’t want to bother with puppet, this project can be of use to you. The base images are nothing more than gentoo base system, dhcp, ddclient, openntp, syslog, vixie-cron, postfix, java, ruby & rubygems, puppet and amazon api/ami tools. This is pretty small and (besides puppet) is the base minimum to run an ec2 instance & exercise the api/ami tools.
I have prebuilt the following public images for people to use if they would like:
ami-d22cc8bb m1.small 32-bit 1-core "athlon-xp" optimized ami-c02cc8a9 m1.large 64-bit 2-core "opteron" optimized ami-c12cc8a8 m1.xlarge 64-bit 4-core "opteron" optimized ami-5d2dc934 c1.medium 32-bit 2-core "prescott" optimized ami-332cc85a c1.xlarge 64-bit 8-core "nocona" optimized
Posted on October 13th, 2008 by dysinger
Filed under: @work
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