# Amazon EC2 Image

This image is meant to be used in [Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)][ec2], a

popular cloud computing platform. It conforms to Amazon’s

[guidelines][guidelines] and [requirements][requirements] for shared AMIs.

## Implementation Choices

EC2 uses Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) internally, which can only be created

inside EC2. An image in a standard format (ova, vmdk, vhd/x, or raw) must be

imported from S3 storage. *osbuild-composer* generates this image type in the

RAW format for the best compatibility with AWS.

This image is available for `x86_64` and `aarch64`, because those are the only

architectures available in EC2.

EC2 doesn't require any specialized firmware. Thus, in order to keep the

resulting image size small, all `-firmware` packages are excluded. An exception

is the `linux-firmware` package, which cannot be excluded because the `kernel`

package depends on it.

`dracut-config-rescue` is excluded from the image, because the boot loader

entry it provides is broken.

[ec2]: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2

[guidelines]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/building-shared-amis.html

[requirements]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vm-import/latest/userguide/vmie_prereqs.html