As steady as clockwork, Ubuntu 11.04 Natty is released on the day scheduled at least eleven months ago; and thanks to Canonical, tested AMIs for Natty are already published for use on Amazon EC2.
The Ubuntu AMI table at the top of Alestic.com always reflects the latest official Ubuntu AMIs from Canonical and now includes Ubuntu 11.04 Natty.
Click on the EC2 region tab (e.g., us-west-1) to see the list of AMI ids. AMIs are listed for both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures (depending on what instance type you want to run) and for both EBS boot and instance-store. I strongly recommend EBS boot unless you have a specific situation that requires instance-store and you really know what you’re doing. EBS boot has many advantages over instance-store that you may not be aware of until after you need them.
As part of this release, I have added launch buttons to the right of each AMI id on Alestic.com. If you click on one of these buttons you will be taken to the AWS console and dropped directly into the process of launching an EC2 instance of that AMI. Thanks to Scott Moser for pointing out that AWS had implemented support for this cool feature—and for building the Ubuntu AMIs themselves :-)
I’ve been running Ubuntu Natty on my laptop for a couple weeks with good success and look forward to trying out this latest release of Ubuntu on EC2 as well.
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Could you comment on the differences between using 11.04 and 10.10 or 10.04 for an EC2 server?
Will 11.04 have more up-to-date packages? Or will 10.04, since it is a LTS release?
turian:
Since EC2 is a relatively new platform for Ubuntu (couple years official support) and the EC2 platform keeps improving what can be supported on it (e.g., PV), I would recommend using the latest Ubuntu release that you are comfortable with as it will provide the best integration with EC2, the best cloud-init features, and the easiest upgrade path. You'll also get higher versions of the various software components and kernel as is normal with Ubuntu releases.
If you need to stay on the same Ubuntu release for more than 18 months, then an LTS release would be appropriate, but since LTS releases don't get newer software packages (just security type fixes) I bet you'll want to upgrade before long anyway.
For specifics differences between the versions on EC2, please ask this question on the ubuntu-cloud mailing list or ec2ubuntu Google group.
Any chance that you will offer Ubuntu 11.04 with nVidia GPU drivers installed?
The official Ubuntu server AMIs are published by Canonical. You might try asking on the #ubuntu-cloud mailing list.