

A simpler and faster way to install an Amazon EC2 host from a kickstart - eschnou
http://www.comodit.com/2012/11/26/kickstarting-on-ec2/

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eschnou
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.

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

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otterley
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?

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

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garyrichardson
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.

