Updated EBS boot AMIs for Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy on Amazon EC2

For folks still using the old, reliable Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Hardy from 2008, Canonical has released updated AMIs for use on Amazon EC2. Read Scott Moser’s announcement on the ec2ubuntu Google group.

Though Canonical publishes both EBS boot and instance-store for recent Ubuntu releases, they only publish instance-store AMIs for the older Ubuntu 8.04, so…

I have published EBS boot AMIs for Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy using the exact image Canonical uses for the instance-store AMIs.

I also used the same ext3 file system with the same file system label and the same AKI and the same ephemeral disk mounts, so these should be pretty much identical except that the root disk is based on EBS instead of instance-store. The default root disk size is 8GB instead of 10GB to follow the Amazon and Ubuntu standards for EBS boot instances.

The code used to build the EBS boot AMIs using Canonical’s downloadable Hardy images is available in github.

If you’re not already using Hardy and you are just getting started with Ubuntu on EC2, I would recommend jumping straight to the most recent Ubuntu release. At the time of this writing it is Ubuntu 11.04 Natty.

You can find the AMI ids for both EBS boot and instance store for all active releases of Ubuntu (almost all published by Canonical) in the table at the top of Alestic.com.

[Update 2011-06-25: Corrected github link]