Linux

For several years now, I’ve been running all my AWS instances with a recent long-term support edition of Ubuntu server, ZFS as the root file system. Ubuntu 20.04 LTS was released today, so I’ve updated my Packer templates - the original inspiration for the amazon-ebssurrogate builder - to support it!

Ubuntu 20.04 has some nice new features, including:

• ZFS on Linux version 0.8.3,
• Linux Kernel version 5.4, including io_uring and built-in support for WireGuard,
• Up-to-date compiler and runtime packages for a variety of platforms.

Since I last updated these templates, HashiCorp have also added a feature to Packer to allow templates to be authored in HashiCorp Configuration Language v2 instead of JSON.

Last year, I posted about how to build Ubuntu 16.04 AMIs using HashiCorp Packer’s ebs-surrogate builder. Since then Ubuntu 18.04 has been released, and the process has changed a little.

At HashiDays Amsterdam 2018, I gave a talk entitled “systemd: The Good Parts”, in which I tried to focus on how to use systemd, aimed at practitioners who are committed to a Linux distribution which uses the controversial init system.