Official Ubuntu Images for Amazon EC2 from Canonical

Canonical has released official Ubuntu images for EC2 for Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic.

The primary technical benefit brought by Canonical's involvement in building official Ubuntu images is that custom kernels can be built for EC2 through a relationship with Amazon. This means that the Ubuntu images can now run on more modern Ubuntu kernels instead of on Amazon's older, Fedora kernels.

Other differences are listed below:

Alestic.com Ubuntu images Canonical Ubuntu images
Kernel 2.6.21 Karmic: 2.6.31
Releases 9.04 Jaunty
8.10 Intrepid
8.04 Hardy (LTS)
7.10 Gutsy (obsolete)
7.04 Feisty (obsolete)
6.10 Edgy (obsolete)
6.06 Dapper (LTS)
9.10 Karmic
Flavors server
desktop
server
ssh access ssh to root ssh to "ubuntu" with sudo to root
Apt Sources main
restricted
universe
multiverse
Alestic PPA
main
restricted
universe
Apt Mirror Jaunty, Intrepid, Hardy:
ec2-us-east-mirror.rightscale.com (load balanced with failover)
Others: us.archive.ubuntu.com
US: us.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com
EU: eu.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com
Default runlevel runlevel 4 runlevel 2
Tools Amazon EC2 AMI tools installed
runurl installed
euca2ools installed
Amazon tools available (multiverse)
runurl available through Alestic PPA

Items listed are likely to change as images are enhanced. This table may or may not be updated to match. Please leave comments if you notice or question other differences.

Note: There are some older (2009-04) Canonical AMIs floating around for Hardy and Intrepid. These have not been maintained and are not recommended at this point.

Updated 2009-06-15: Alestic.com Jaunty is using an Ubuntu mirror inside EC2. Alestic.com images using load balanced mirror with failover between EC2 availability zones.

Updated 2009-06-25: Alestic.com published Karmic (Alpha) but later withdrew.

Updated 2009-10-29: Canonical released Karmic. None of the image currently have RightScale support built in, but RightScale has their own Ubuntu AMIs.