Updated Ubuntu AMIs for EC2 released by Canonical

As Scott Moser announced, Canonical has released updated AMIs (Amazon Machine Images) for running Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid, Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic, and Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy on Amazon EC2.

The table at the top of Alestic.com has been updated to reflect the new AMI ids. In fact, I have automated this table so that it will update itself without manual intervention whenever new AMIs are released by Canonical, thanks to their AMI query API.

If you’re interested in automatically retrieving AMI ids for your own uses, here’s a sample URL for the released AMI ids for Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid (server) in an easy to parse format:

http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/query/lucid/server/released.current.txt

Other releases can be retrieved from similar URLs, or you can traverse the available results starting at the root:

http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/query/

You can get pointers to the daily AMI builds through this API, but I recommend sticking to the “released.current” lists for the best tested and most stable AMIs. These are the AMI ids that are listed in the table at the top of Alestic.com for easy browsing, along with the legacy AMIs which I published as “Alestic” for older releases not supported by Canonical.