UEC/Images

The term 'UEC Images' refers to the Official Ubuntu images that are available at http://uec-images.ubuntu.com . These images are built by Canonical. They are then registered on EC2, and compressed tarfiles are made available for download. The downloaded content can be used as a starting point for creating your own image, or published unmodified to your own UEC.

Daily and Released Images

"Daily" builds are made available for testing and continuous integration. The daily builds are not tested at all. However, the content of the images has already been through the SRU process, so in general the daily builds for stable releases are stable. Quality of daily builds for the development release will vary.

Prior to a milestone or release, a daily builds is selected, tested and then promoted. Only a limited number of daily images are kept around (see the removal policy). Any build that is marked as 'released' will never be deleted.

Daily builds are available under http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/server/<codename> . For example, daily builds of lucid (10.04 LTS) are available at http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/server/lucid/ . Released builds are available under http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/server/releases/<codename> .

To use the images on EC2, simply start an instance with the command line tools using command lines given at uec-images, or launch one of these from the Amazon EC2 Console.

Features of the Images

Version Controlled Build Process

Its not really an end user feature, but a reliable build process in place. Images are built on a 10.04 LTS host from a 0.11 branch of vmbuilder. The build scripts are available under the automated-ec2-builds, and published to uec-images and EC2 using ec2-publishing-scripts.

CloudInit

The images contain CloudInit. CloudInit allows for dynamic run-time customization of images via user-data.

Run Images locally without a Cloud

Images after 10.10 can now be run outside of the cloud environment without any difficult setup.

Machine Consumable Data

In order to provide information about what builds are available for download or running on ec2, a 'query' interface is exposed at http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/query .

The data is laid out as follows:

There are 2 files in top level director 'daily.latest.txt' and 'released.latest.txt'. Each of these files contains tab delimited data, with 4 fields per record. daily.latest.txt has information about the daily builds, released.latest.tt about released builds:
```
   <suite> <build_name> <label>     <serial>
   hardy   server       release     20100128
```
For each record in the top level files another set of files will exist under <suite>/<build_name>

File	Description
daily-dl.txt	downloadable images data for all daily builds currently available
daily-dl.current.txt	downloadable images data for the most recent daily build
released-dl.txt	downloadable images data for all released builds
released-dl.current.txt	downloadable images data for the most recent released build
daily.txt	registered ec2 AMI data for all daily builds ever
daily.current.txt	registered ec2 AMI data for the most recent daily build
released.txt	registered ec2 AMI data for all released builds
released.current.txt	registered ec2 AMI data for the most recent released built

The downloadable image data files contain 6 tab delimited fields:

<suite>  <build_name> <label> <serial> <arch> <download_path>
maverick server       daily   20100819 i386   server/maverick/20100819/maverick-server-uec-i386.tar.gz

Download path is relative to "http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/"

The registered ec2 AMI data contain 10 tab delimited fields:

<suite>  <build_name> <label> <serial>    <root-store>   <arch> <region>  <ami>         <aki>        <ari>
maverick server       alpha3  20100803.2  instance-store i386   us-west-1 ami-ebdc8dae  aki-99a0f1dc <ari>