Choosing an AMI

Cloudera Director, Cloudera Manager, and CDH support only 64-bit Linux based AMIs. For CDH and Cloudera Manager on Amazon EC2, Cloudera Director only supports RHEL and CentOS distributions. Refer to Requirements and Supported Versions for details.

Cloudera recommends doing the following when choosing an AMI:
  • Search on the Community AMIs page of the AWS Management Console, as described below, for the best selection.
  • HVM virtualization instead of PV virtualization. For more information on HVM and PV virtualization, see Linux AMI Virtualization Types in the AWS documentation.
  • Use the most recent GA release of a specific distribution. Typically, there are multiple releases associated with a specific distribution. Cloudera recommends that you select the highest version.

Finding Available AMIs

There are two ways of finding available AMIs: with the AWS Management Console (UI) or with the command line tool awscli. These two ways are described in the following sections.

Using the Amazon AWS Management Console

  1. Log into your AWS account and ensure you are in the desired region.
  2. Click on EC2 and click the Launch Instance button.
  3. The Choose AMI page will open with Step 1: Choose an Amazon Machine Image. In the left pane, you can select from the following:
    • Quick Start
    • My AMIs
    • AWS Marketplace
    • Community AMIs

    Select Community AMIs in the left pane.

  4. In the search box, type in the desired operating system. For example, if rhel-6.6 HVM is typed in the search box, the search results show the versions of RHEL v6.6 that support HVM. Select the highest GA number in order to use the latest release of v6.6 supporting HVM:



  5. Click Select for the AMI version you choose.

Using the AWS CLI

The second way to find AMIs is to generate a list of suitable AMIs with the AWS CLI. For example, to generate a list of RHEL 64-bit AMIs using the AWS CLI, run the query below.

Prerequisite: Install the AWS CLI and follow the setup instructions to be able to run commands. 
aws ec2 describe-images \
--output table \
--query 'Images[*].[VirtualizationType,Name,ImageId]' \
--owners 309956199498 \
--filters \
Name=root-device-type,Values=ebs \
Name=image-type,Values=machine \
Name=is-public,Values=true \
Name=hypervisor,Values=xen \
Name=architecture,Values=x86_64
--