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A simpler and faster way to install an Amazon EC2 host from a kickstart
- eschnou 14y agoActually, it also works like a charm for Debian/Ubuntu with a preseed file and we've also tested the same process on openstack, cloudstack and rackspace.
- gdethier 14y agoNote that user-data are kickstart specific so do not forget to adapt them (actually change grub's kernel line) when preseeding.
- otterley 14y agoKickstart and preseeding are very useful if you're deploying lots of hosts on bare metal. But in a virtualized environment, why use them instead of building a template AMI and then cloning it?
- gdethier 14y agoOne reason is portability: you won't be able to directly deploy your AMI on OpenStack, CloudStack, etc.
- garyrichardson 14y agoI have a set of tools I can use to target multiple output formats. The base of it installs the OS and configures the system how ever you want -- all onto a disk image. It can then be packaged into AMI or vmdk. Those are the only two I've had to target so far, but I suspect most vm systems ultimately use raw disk images so I suspect I can port my system to whatever format I need. Using things like kickstart and chef/puppet has been brutal for me.. Spinning up a bunch of instances and hoping the installs go smoothly. You don't know for 20 minutes +. AMI's are so much more reliable. Of course, the cost is flexibility -- most changes require new images.