Discussion of improvmenet and enhancements to the Cloud Images and Cloud-Init

• Addition of an SSH recovery Shell: Depending on the virtualization solution (i.e. EC2 EBS versus EC2 Instance-store versus OpenStack), the ability to recover from file system corruption is limited or non-existent. In order to support users across different virtualization solutions, it is proposed to introduce a SSH recovery method to assist users in recovering from file-system corruption or missing disks.

Proposal: 1. On failure of mount-all or on cloud-init failure to mount all disks, SSH would be launched 2. Users would be forced into a screen session with an error message. 3. Users would need to reboot.

• Dynamic multiple LOCALE support: While English is the language of Ubuntu development, the use of Ubuntu is global. Further many Ubuntu users have default locale settings that are different. When SSH'ing into a Ubuntu Cloud Image, some software may fail to work properly with invalid locale settings set by SSH.

  Proposal: Develop a method of compiling new locales based on SSH LC_* and LANG settings sent by SSH client.

• Improving methods for users to find official EC2 AMI ids: Over the last couple of months we have made significant progress in developing new ways for users to discover the official EC2 AMI ids. Between the AWS Quickstart, AWS Marketplace (free tier and paid support), cloud-utils (which provides ubuntu-cloudimg-query), cloud-images.ubuntu.com (/query and /query2) and cloud.ubuntu.com/ami, there are several official ways to find the images.

  Discussion: What are the deficiencies in the current methods of finding images and how could we make finding the official AMI's easier?