Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6
Amazon Web Services | 6.5_GALinux/Unix, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5_GA - 64-bit Amazon Machine Image (AMI)
Too Old To Still Be On MarketPlace
This AMI is the first-hit returned by an AMI search for RHEL 6. Unfortunately, it's a very *OLD* AMI, meaning that it requires pretty much 100% of the installed packages being upgraded.
Given that this AMI is also stupidly-fat at 420+ RPMs (seriously: why would SSSD, NFS, CIFS and several other RPMs need to be on what should be a starting-point kind of AMI??), doing an update takes *forever*. Even better, trying to use cloud-init to do the update resulted in broken (as in not recoverable with the yum DB manipulation/cleanup tools) yum DBs on two of the three instances I launched. Nothing like trying to query the yum DB and getting a few hundred "conflicts with" and "duplicates" errors.
Ultimately, found and switched to a newer, HVM AMI. Fortunately, I didn't *need* a specifically PV-type AMI, as my intents for launching the AMI was to use it to create a custom AMI (which is why a fat AMI is especially problematic).
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badly prepared AMI
The low score for this AMI certainly isn't because of the RHEL - that indeed is a very nice OS overall. Not much to say there.
However this default AMI which most of the people are going to use is just a basic/default installation of @Base - and that has a problem that it includes unneeded bloat, eg. WiFi firmware & drivers and so on.
Amazon Linux takes about a 1GB and something after installation and also comes with AWS tools. This RHEL installation takes up almost 2GB and even doesn't have the AWS tools...
Until this AMI is at least *a bit* crafted for AWS I'll have to stick with creating a custom AMI.
Fast and reliable
We are testing a prototype web application using Drupal 7 with a MySQL DB (Amazon RDS) joined to an internal MS SQL Server via OCDB connections.
This virtual machine is fast and secure as we had some Russians attempting some cgi exploits to no avail. Updates are available about every week.
The RDS And EC2 services are working very nicely, too bad Drupal and S3 don't play we'll together.
In the free tier category, amazon's AMI, is good, but RHEL 6 is way better. windows server is last, because it's a RAM hog!
Thanks goes to Red Hat for making this available in the free tier, for us, non-profit groups.
Kudos!