A simpler and faster way to install an Amazon EC2 host from a kickstart

comodit.com

14 points·eschnou··5 comments

Actually, it also works like a charm for Debian/Ubuntu with a preseed file and we've also tested the same process on openstack, cloudstack and rackspace.

Note that user-data are kickstart specific so do not forget to adapt them (actually change grub's kernel line) when preseeding.

Kickstart and preseeding are very useful if you're deploying lots of hosts on bare metal. But in a virtualized environment, why use them instead of building a template AMI and then cloning it?

One reason is portability: you won't be able to directly deploy your AMI on OpenStack, CloudStack, etc.

I have a set of tools I can use to target multiple output formats. The base of it installs the OS and configures the system how ever you want -- all onto a disk image. It can then be packaged into AMI or vmdk. Those are the only two I've had to target so far, but I suspect most vm systems ultimately use raw disk images so I suspect I can port my system to whatever format I need.

Using things like kickstart and chef/puppet has been brutal for me.. Spinning up a bunch of instances and hoping the installs go smoothly. You don't know for 20 minutes +. AMI's are so much more reliable. Of course, the cost is flexibility -- most changes require new images.

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