Hi all, trying to refresh my AWS skills (VPS ? T2 Instances ??), I visited the Marketplace page for the Debian images, and found out that there are a bunch of user reviews. I would like to take the opportunity to make a quick, perhaps partial, summary.
https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B00WUNJIEE There are 83 reviews. 61 with 5 stars, 5 with 4 stars, 7 with 3 stars, 2 with 2 stars and 8 with 1 star. I did not read much of the 5-star reviews. Many thank yous :) In the 2- and 1-star reviews, there is a reccurent complain that disks from images booted from the AWS Marketplace can not be attached elsewhere. There is nothing we can do for that. One negative review was about the fact that the image did not resize accordingly to the volume size. (Is that what we fixed with the "growpart issue"?). One user could not login as "admin"; not sure why. Another user was upset that there is no "root" account. Here, we followed the strong recommendations of Amazon. One user had the SSH error "Error in ssh2: I/O error in version negotiation{com.mindbright.ssh2.SSH2VersionNegotiationException: I/O error in version negotiation}" For the old-style PVM images (https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B00AA27RK4), one user (still giving us 4 stars) regretted that we do not provide updates of Jessie anymore. Altogether, in comparison to the wave of upset attitudes being thrown to us on this list, it seems that we managed to satisfy most of the users who expressed themselves. This is not to say that some system tweaking parameters should not be corrected, but I think that "the priorities of our users" on the AWS platform may be different than the developer-driven priority of unifying all cloud platforms to a very minimal system. For instance, nobody ever complained for the presence of packages like apt-transport-https; I guess that the reason is that it has no visible cost on those who do not use it. From the users reactions, it seems that our natural competitors here are Ubuntu (obviously) and CentOS. Perhaps obviously, no review mentionned something like "the Debian image on the AWS was too bad, so I switched to [GCE|Azure|...]. Have a nice day, -- Charles Plessy Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan
