EBS-SSD Boot AMIs For Ubuntu On Amazon EC2

With Amazon’s announcement that SSD is now available for EBS volumes, they have also declared this the recommended EBS volume type.

The good folks at Canonical are now building Ubuntu AMIs with EBS-SSD boot volumes. In my preliminary tests, running EBS-SSD boot AMIs instead of EBS magnetic boot AMIs speeds up the instance boot time by approximately… a lot.

Canonical now publishes a wide variety of Ubuntu AMIs including:

  • 64-bit, 32-bit
  • EBS-SSD, EBS-SSD pIOPS, EBS-magnetic, instance-store
  • PV, HVM
  • in every EC2 region
  • for every active Ubuntu release

Matrix that out for reasonable combinations and you get 492 AMIs actively supported today.

On the Alestic.com blog, I provide a handy reference to the much smaller set of Ubuntu AMIs that match my generally recommended configurations for most popular uses, specifically:

I list AMIs for both PV and HVM, because different virtualization technologies are required for different EC2 instance types.

Where SSD is not available, I list the magnetic EBS boot AMI (e.g., Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid).

To access this list of recommended AMIs, select an EC2 region in the pulldown menu towards the top right of any page on Alestic.com.

If you like using the AWS console to launch instances, click on the orange launch button to the right of the AMI id.

The AMI ids are automatically updated using an API provided by Canonical, so you always get the freshest released images.