At least It's better than their CentOS 6 AMIs...

• By Thomas Jones
• on 10/21/2015

To be honest, the AMIs from CentOS.Org are generally disappointing. While they're great starting points for creating more useful AMIs, they're not otherwise well-suited for generic use.

While it's nice that they're finally releasing AMIs with cloud-init, it's a bit disappointing that the AWS cli tools aren't included. It's really not that hard to export the SRPMs from an Amazon Linux instance and build them for other instance types. So, really not sure why CentOS doesn't include them. It's literally five minutes worth of work (if'you've scripted the process out). That they don't even include the awscli package from either pypi or from S3 is even more disappointing - as there's next to zero work to install that package.

Why is this a gripe-point for me? No AWS CLI tools greatly limits what you can do with your AMI: there's little point attaching an instance role if you've got no tools to make use of that role; if you want to make use of the HVM optimized drivers, no AWS RPMs means you're kinda boned, too.