Deep Learning AMI is just an Ubuntu image with nothing installed :)

• By Janosch
• on 09/27/2017

Two weeks ago I got excited at a presentation from two AWS architects in Cambridge telling us how great it is to use Amazon cloud services because they come with everything pre-installed and you could focus on doing your research.

I did choose the p2.xlarge AMI in Ireland to do deep learning on image data. I tried following several tutorials I found on Amazon websites and smart IT blogs to be successful. The disappointment started with Jupyter not being installed. Then trying to do simple Python import commands resulted in Tensorflow not found, MXnet not found and including other core packages required.
After installing Jupyter and lots of other libraries needed to get tensorflow-gpu support to work it turned out that the Cuda library is not properly installed. See also other reviews.

I have spent now a full day installing stuff from scratch which cost me a lot of time and 10$ in cloud services without much progress. I am not going to give up and will soon be a deep learning professional IT architect. Thank you Amazon for your enticing marketing and despicable software services! Lesson learned :)