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.