The Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid AMis for Amazon EC2 dated 20100923 have a known bug which causes the mountall process to spin CPU when the instance is rebooted.
You can observe this by starting a Lucid instance, running sudo reboot, and then running top after reconnecting.
Cpu(s): 38.5%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 61.5%st
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
49 root 20 0 4128 1180 920 R 38.6 0.1 0:08.57 mountall
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:
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.
Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid was released on Amazon EC2 right on schedule today along with the rest of the normal Ubuntu image download channels.
Congrats to all the Ubuntu folks who were involved in putting this together! Though I’ve enjoyed contributing to the cause over the years, I’m happy to say that I had very little involvement with this release on EC2, leaving me more time to focus on my startup and family. Though many individuals are involved, I’d like to acknowledge the hard work of Scott Moser who has taken the point for publishing official Ubuntu EC2 images these last couple releases.
This is also the first Ubuntu release on EC2 that includes officially supported EBS boot AMIs, taking yet another task off my plate and providing a trusted source for this useful image type.
I’ve listed all of the current Ubuntu and Debian AMI ids in the table at the top of Alestic.com. Simply click on the EC2 region where you want to run your instances to find the AMI ids.
If you’re running an older release of Ubuntu on EC2, see my recommended upgrade paths.
Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid is expected to be released this Thursday (April 29, 2010). This is the first LTS (long term support) release since Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy, which has itself been a stable and reliable server platform for years both inside and outside of Amazon EC2.
If you’re starting a new server project on EC2, Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid would be a great release to start with. It will be supported for five years with security patches and major bug fixes.
If you are already running a different Ubuntu release on EC2, you should consider planning an upgrade to Lucid. Here are my thoughts for each release you might currently be running on EC2:
Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy should continue to be fairly stable for a while, though there does not appear to be a lot of EC2-specific development being applied to the AMIs, so you may want to upgrade to Lucid LTS at your leisure. You will probably want to start new instances, though with Scott’s comment below, it might be possible to upgrade in-place on EBS boot from Hardy to Lucid. If you happen to still be running the Alestic Hardy AMIs, you should at least consider upgrading to the Hardy AMIs published by Canonical and listed at the top of Alestic.com.
Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid has reached its end of life and should no longer be used on EC2. If you are still running Intrepid, you should immediately start upgrading to Karmic or Intrepid through starting new instances.
Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty on EC2 is still running on an old Fedora 8 kernel and is not supported by Ubuntu. I’ve been recommending an upgrade from Jaunty for a while. I continue to recommend upgrading to Karmic (if you want something that has been tested in production for a while) or Lucid (once you’re comfortable with the release).
Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic still works great on EC2, though there are a couple bothersome bugs (like hostname reset on reboot) that should be fixed by upgrading to Lucid. If you are running an EBS boot Karmic instance, then it is possible to upgrade in place, but it’s also fine to simply start new instances.
Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid pre-release instances should be upgraded to the released version. If you are running EBS boot Lucid, then it is possible to upgrade in place even if there are a newer kernel and ramdisk.
Scott Moser of Canonical has laid out the steps necessary to upgrade an EC2 instance in place without having to start a new EC2 instance. This only works for instances that are currently running an EBS boot pre-release Lucid AMI or an EBS boot 9.10 Karmic AMI. All other servers will need to be upgraded by starting new Lucid instances to replace the old instances. Fortunately, EC2 makes that easy.
In fact, EC2 makes starting new replacement instances so convenient, I would recommend following that procedure in most cases even if you think you can upgrade a server in place. If you encounter any troubles in getting your service to run on Lucid, running a new instance makes it straight forward to fall back to the old server. And, once you are happy with the new server, make it your production system, terminate the old one and don’t look back.
Welcome to the new world of cloud computing where you can instantly acquire and discard server hardware for mere dollars without worrying about large investments, complicated provisioning, and long term support costs.
I will add the new Lucid AMI ids to the table at the top of Alestic.com as soon as I get word that they are ready.
For the last year I have been working with Canonical and the Ubuntu server team, helping to migrate over to a more official process what I’ve been doing for the community in supporting Ubuntu on EC2. The Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic EC2 images are a fantastic result of this team’s work: An Ubuntu image running on real Ubuntu kernels with official support available.
For the next two days (Nov 14-15) I will be participating in the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) in Dallas, Texas. Developers from around the world will be gathering this week to scope and define the next version of Ubuntu which will be released in April 2010.
As part of this, I think it would be helpful to gather input from the community. Please use the comment section of this article to share what you would like to see happen with the direction of Ubuntu on EC2 in the coming release(s).
Are there any features which you find missing? Functionality which would be helpful? Problems which keep getting in your way?
Feel free to brainstorm and toss out ideas big and small, even if they are not completely thought through or if they would also take help from Amazon to complete. It may already be too late to start off some of the proposals for the Lucid release cycle, but having ideas to think about for future releases never hurts.