Linux – Confused about what Amazon EC2 image (AMI) to use for CentOS

amazon ec2centoslinux

I use Fedora as my home machine and thus wanted to use Centos 6.0 linux as amazon EC2 instance. Here is the thing though – Amazon gives you long list of very unscientifically sorted instances, some of them as I understand Centos 6.0:

158864314994/mesos-hypertable-centos-6
944964708905/rightimage_centos_6.0_i386_20110810.1_ebs
944964708905/rightimage_centos_6.0_86x64_20110810.1_ebs
452552107804/Bayscribe-SearchServer2-CentOS6-EBS_9-8
452552107804/Bayscribe-SearchServer2-CentOS6-EBS_9-9

or something like this.

What do I have to do to get my beloved standard minimal netinstall of Centos 6.0?

Does Amazon maintains official images? because how do I know if these 3-rd party images don't contain some malicious crap?

Best Answer

The official "Amazon Linux" AMIs are binary compatible with CentOS (presumably they are based on CentOS) so should be very familiar to you if that is your preferred distro.

A few trusted third parties like RightScale also publish CentOS AMIs.

You are correct to not trust random AMIs found in the general list. Always start at the site of a trusted AMI publisher to get the AMI id. Just because an AMI says "rightimage" doesn't mean it was published by RightScale.

Affiliation disclosure: RightScale sponsors my personal tech blog, http://Alestic.com

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