How to select an Amazon EC2 kernel?

Question

When launching an instance, I'm presented with this most cryptic list:

There seems to be absolutely zero documentation on Amazon as to which kernel does what. They explain fairly well what these kernels are for, but without knowing what those numbers mean, kernels appear to be utterly useless.

Where can I find out what a given kernel means, or what the latest kernel is for a given OS?

Answer 1

Kernels are usually very tightly coupled with the OS they're supposed to run along. Usually, we rather use a AMI (Amazon Machine Image) which includes both the Kernel (AKI) and the associated AMI data to ensure the whole VM will boot without error.

To identify a given AMI, you should use some tools:

• Firefox ElasticFox plugin that helps you exploring the images ( http://aws.amazon.com/developertools/609?_encoding=UTF8&jiveRedirect=1 )
• If you know what kind of distro you want, you can for example have a look at Alestic webpage (for ubuntu): http://alestic.com/index.html . I'm pretty confident there exists other AMI repositories.
• Command Line tools can also help you searching and listing the available AMI.

Good Luck with EC2 :-)