Alestic.com - A Personal AWS Blog by Eric Hammond

use concurrent AWS command line requests to search the world for your instance, image, volume, snapshot, …

Background

Amazon EC2 and many other AWS services are divided up into various regions across the world. Each region is a separate geographic area and is completely independent of other regions.

Though this is a great architecture for preventing global meltdown, it can occasionally make life more difficult for customers, as we must interact with each region separately.

One example of this is when we have the id for an AMI, instance, or other EC2 resource and want to do something with it but don’t know which region it is in.

This happens on ServerFault when a poster presents a problem with an instance, provides the initial AMI id, but forgets to specify the EC2 region. In order to find and examine the AMI, you need to look in each region to discover where it is.

Amazon has announced a new AWS region in Sydney, Australia with the name ap-southeast-2.

The official Ubuntu AMI lookup pages (1, 2) don’t seem to be showing the new location yet, but the official Ubuntu AMI query API does seem to be working, so the new ap-southeast-2 Ubuntu AMIs are available for lookup on Alestic.com.

[Update 2012-11-13: Canonical has fixed the primary Ubuntu AMI lookup page and I understand it should remain more up to date going forward, but the other page is still missing ap-southeast-2]

Point and Click

At the top right of most pages on Alestic.com is an “Ubuntu AMIs” section. Simply select the EC2 region from the pulldown (say “ap-southeast-2” for Sydney, Australia) and you will see a list of the official 64-bit Ubuntu AMI ids for the various active Ubuntu releases.

Amazon Web Services has launched a new EC2 region in Tokyo named ap-northeast-1. Canonical has released new AMIs in this region for the standard Ubuntu releases they are supporting in other regions including AMIs for:

• Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick (EBS boot and instance-store)
• Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid (EBS boot and instance-store)
• Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic (instance-store only)
• Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Hardy (instance-store only)

For convenient lookup, the table at the top of Alestic.com reflects the Ubuntu AMIs from Canonical for this and other EC2 regions.

Update: Since this article was written, Amazon has released the ability to copy EBS boot AMIs between regions using the web console, command line, and API. You may still find information of use in this article, but Amazon has solved some of the harder parts for you.

Using Amazon EC2, you created an EBS boot AMI and it’s working fine, but now you want to run instances of that AMI in a different EC2 region. Since AMIs are region specific, you need a copy of the image in each region where instances are required.

This article presents one method you can use to copy an EBS boot from one EC2 region to another.

[Update 2015-06-16: Upgrade to latest aws-cli command syntax]

Amazon recently launched the ability to upload your own ssh public key to EC2 so that it can be passed to new instances when they are launched. Prior to this you always had to use an ssh keypair that was generated by Amazon.

The benefits of using your own ssh key include:

• Amazon never sees the private part of the ssh key (though they promise they do not save a copy after you downloaded it and we all trust them with this)

• The private part of the ssh key is never transmitted over the network (though it always goes over an encrypted connection and we mostly trust this)

• You can now upload the same public ssh key to all EC2 regions, so you no longer have to keep track of a separate ssh key for each region.

• You can use your default personal ssh key with brand new EC2 instances, so you no longer have to remember to specify options like -i EC2KEYPAIR in every ssh, scp, rsync command.

If you haven’t yet created an ssh key for your local system, it can be done with the command:

Amazon EC2 just launched the Asia Pacific region with data centers in Singapore.

The standard Ubuntu and Debian AMIs (Amazon Machine Images) from Canonical and Alestic are already available in this new region. I have listed the new AMI ids in the table at the top of Alestic.com.

To see the AMIs, simply click on the ap-southeast-1 tab in the table at the top.

If you’re just getting into using Ubuntu on Amazon EC2, consider joining the EC2 Ubuntu group for community support.

The Ubuntu and Debian images listed on https://alestic.com are now available in both the US (us-east-1) and Europe (eu-west-1) EC2 regions.

Click on the “Europe” tab at the top of the table to see the new AMI ids for Europe.

Only the most recent images have been copied over to the Europe region. Let me know if you have specific older images which you would like to run in Europe.