Call for testing: Stretch cloud images on AWS

Following up on Steve McIntyre’s writeup of the Debian Cloud Sprint that took place in Seattle this past November, I’m pleased to announce the availability of preliminary Debian stretch AMIs for Amazon EC2. Pre-generated images are available in all public AWS regions, or you can use FAI with the fai-cloud-images configuration tree to generate your own images. The pre-generated AMIs were created on 25 January, shortly after Linux 4.9 entered stretch, and their details follow:

As with the current jessie images, these use a default username of ‘admin’, with access controlled by the ssh key named in the ec2 run-instances invocation. They’re intended to provide a reasonably complete Debian environment without too much bloat. IPv6 addressing should be supported in an appropriately configured VPC environment.

These images were build using Thomas Lange’s FAI, which has been used for over 15 years for provisioning all sorts of server, workstation, and VM systems, but which only recently was adapted for use generating cloud disk images. It has proven to be well suited to this task though, and image creation is straightforward and flexible. I’ll describe in a followup post the steps you can follow to create and customize your own AMIs based on our recipes. In the meantime, please do test these images! You can submit bug reports to the cloud.debian.org metapackage, and feedback is welcome via the debian-cloud mailing list or #debian-cloud on IRC.