Update: Unfortunately the snapshot behind this AMI was affected by the AWS data deletion bug recently, so is no longer available. VMware haven’t yet released their own official AMI, but Rightscale’s build is excellent.

There’s lots of excitement and interest around VMware’s new open source platform as a service (PaaS) offering, but at the moment the only way to try it is either to sign up to the cloudfoundry.com service and wait for an invite, or use an image the RightScale have developed for AWS.

However, there’s no real reason the image had to be used via RightScale, so I’ve created an AWS Micro image based on the regular AWS Ubuntu 10.04 image, and following the instructions from github.

It took around 3 hours to do the full build, all the compiles, etc, so I figured it was worth making the AMI image available to everyone, so other people don’t have to do the same thing. I’ve added a 512MB swap file, as the management tools need more memory than a normal Micro image can cope with, but other than that it’s pretty much the stock image.

You can launch the public AMI instance now, from the “eu-west-1” region with the public AMI ID “ami-17dee963”. You can’t launch it from the other regions, sorry. It’ll launch as a Micro image, so it could even be free if it’s your first AWS instance.

The various build tests all pass, but sometimes it is a little slow to run (due to the lack of memory).

Login as “ubuntu”, then run:

cd ~/cloudfoundry/vcap
bin/vcap start
bin/vcap tail

And you should see everything working. If you need to do any debugging, the place to start is the github CloudFoundry VCAP section.

This image is provided as a test version, please don’t rely on it for anything, and I’ll remove the AMI image when the VMware guys launch their own CloudFoundry “Micro” package in a few weeks.

Update: Unfortunately the snapshot behind this AMI was affected by the AWS data deletion bug recently, so is no longer available. VMware haven’t yet released their own official AMI, but Rightscale’s build is excellent.