Open Source And Cloud Computing: The Amazon Linux AMI Is Now Available

Yesterday, Amazon Web Services announced that they are offering their own Amazon Linux AMI for EC2 customers. This will be available along with the large collection of other AMIs in EC2. The idea behind this AMI is to offer EC2 customers a lean AMI which is highly optimized for EC2 environment. The AMI is available for both 32 and 64 bit form and in all the AWS regions. This highlights one of the important roles played by Open Source in the Cloud based world. It offers the freedom to cloud vendors to offer fine tuned versions of Operating Systems to run on their cloud environment, something they can’t even dream off in the case of proprietary systems.

I guess Amazon AMI is built with CentOS as the base. They have stripped down unnecessary applications, services, etc. and offer the just enough OS and libraries needed to run an EC2 instance. They have also bundled the tools and libraries needed to run the instance on AWS environment. Amazon has set up a S3 based repository which can be tapped to install other applications needed for the users. Some of the advantages of offering Amazon Linux API are

They can offer really lean API which doesn’t complicate things for users.
The fact that it doesn’t run unwanted services makes these APIs more secure than one plucked from third party vendors and the ones packaged by hobbyists.
One of the cloud security concerns cited by Chris Hoff in his Cloudifornication talk at Gluecon last year was the use of AMIs that are not verified for its authenticity (like presence of trojans or rootkits). Even though I feel it is more of a common sense problem than a cloud problem, it is a pretty valid point. There are many who just download an AMI out of the internet and use it for their needs. By offering their own AMI, Amazon can assure users that it is a clean AMI and it could be established as a go to place for anyone who wants an AMI for their needs.
By having their own repository for patches, Amazon could (at least in theory) patch these OSes running on their environment for security holes before the major Linux vendors do it.

Amazon Linux AMI can be booted from the AWS Management Console and since it is a supported AMI, Amazon Premium Support customers can get telephone support from them. Like in the case of other Linux distros, Amazon will update their AMIs at regular intervals and offer these updated versions as new AMIs. Since the base of the AMI is CentOS, any application that can run on CentOS can run on Amazon AMIs. Along with the base OS, necessary libraries and AWS tools, the base AMI contains

Python, Perl and PHP
Apache HTTP Server
MySQL and PostgreSQL databases

Since Amazon AMI uses RPM and Yum for package management, users will be able to install any application from third party repositories. This is a pretty interesting move on the part of Amazon and it will be interesting to see where they go from here.