We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of Official CentOS images on Amazon's EC2 Cloud.

The CentOS AWS Market Place page can be found at the CentOS AWS Marketplace

Getting Started with CentOS on Amazon Web Services

Most people use the Amazon web services via their web site at http://aws.amazon.com/ or via some command line tools or using a configuration management system. Some of the options and how to get started with those options are listed here as quick start guides.

• Getting started with the AWS EC2 Command line tools

• An alternative to the Amazon command line tools is Euca2ools which exports the same functionality as the AWS EC2 Command line tools but with a slightly different syntax

• Many people use automation and configuration management to work with cloud instances, and we have a guide for getting started with CentOS on AWS using Ansible.

We welcome all contributions for guides and howtos, so get your favorite tools mentioned here by joining the CentOS Docs mailing list, authoring an article for the wiki, and having it added to this section.

Getting Help and Support Options

These images are supported via the usual CentOS support venues listed at the Getting Help page.

We also encourage you to sign-up with the CentOS Virt mailing list, where discussions and notices about the CentOS Cloud efforts are handled.

Report all bugs and issues at the issue tracker

For more interactive and real time conversations, feel free to drop into #centos-virt on irc.freenode.net but do look through the CentOS irc guidelines and details page first.

Images

Below are the marketplace links for various images, one key benefit of going down the route of using the Market Place is that you will then be subscribed to receive important security and bugfix announcements about these images, issued by the CentOS Project via Amazon's services:

x86_64

i386

On advice from AWS, we no longer publish or maintain i386/i686 images; if you need these, please get in touch and we can help bootstrap.

Official CentOS Linux : Public Images

These images are pubished outside of the AWS Market Place.

Finding AMI ids

If you want to use find the ami ids with the api, you can use the product code to search in each region. Keep in mind that multiple AMI ids may be associated with a product key. These correspond to different releases of the product. Here's an example command using awscli in us-east-1 to find the CentOS-7 images: aws --region us-east-1 ec2 describe-images --owners aws-marketplace --filters Name=product-code,Values=aw0evgkw8e5c1q413zgy5pjce

One method to use this in automation would be the following:

1. Get list of images in a region using the product-code as a filter.
2. Use the image with the most recent creation date.

Image Release Notes

1. Point release images ( eg. 6.3 and 6.4 ) might now have security implications, these images are built against only the release ISO media at the time of this point release, and do not have any updates applied. We highly recommend people consider using the updated images marked as CentOS-6- and CentOS-5- rather than point release images.

2. We recommend that you always run a yum update as the first thing after install as even for the more updated "-5-" or "-6-" images, they are released on a timed schedule and there may be security updates released in the main CentOS trees that happen between image builds.

Image Builder Notes

1. All images have selinux set to Enabled.

2. Time zone inside the images is set to UTC.
3. Root passwords are generated at first-boot for these images, applied and then locked. This is to ensure that every image has a unique root password.

Known Issues

1. Images are installed with only the English language support included, when running an update yum reports a few language support file errors, they can be safely ignored.