RHEL 7 - AWS specific packages

To answer to your customer, there are a lot of information on the RedHat Partner webpage on our website: it is explained who is in charge of creating the RHEL AMI. It's RedHat :-)

https://aws.amazon.com/partners/redhat/faqs/

Extract of the FAQ:

Q: Is there any difference between Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2 and the versions I can run in my data center?

No, Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2 is maintained by Red Hat and is identical to the version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux available for installation on physical hardware. AWS customers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2 receive access to the base images (AMIs) and updates from Red Hat.

So, normally, no need for your customer to recreate another RHEL AMI to fit the requirements.

In addition, I've compared the list of packages given by your customer and the packages available by default on a vanilla RHEL. I used this official packages list from RedHat:

https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/7/pdf/Package_Manifest/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux-7-Package_Manifest-en-US.pdf

Most of the packages he listed are not specific to the RHEL AMI designed by RedHat for AWS. The following packages are common and part of the vanilla ISO image:

• NetworkManager-tui
• PyYAML
• audit-libs-python
• checkpolicy
• chrony
• dracut-config-generic
• iwl7265-firmware
• libsemanage-python
• policycoreutils-python
• python-IPy
• python-babel
• python-jinja2
• setools-libs

The main difference is about the Cloud-init packages and its dependencies. Cloud-init is not a AWS specific package, but an opensource project providing the integration between Linux and the most common Clouds (Openstack is part of them).

cloud-init

Here are some info about this project:

https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Virtualization/3.3/html/Administration_Guide/sect-Using_Cloud-Init_to_Automate_the_Configuration_of_Virtual_Machines.html

https://cloudinit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

This package has the following requirements/dependencies:

The list is available on Launchpad.

http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~cloud-init-dev/cloud-init/trunk/view/head:/requirements.txt

You'll find the need of the 3 packages below. Your customer found them on the RHEL AMI:

• pyserial
• python-jsonpatch
• python-prettytable

Those packages are maintained by RedHat on the rhel-7-server-rh-common-rpms channel:

https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux_OpenStack_Platform/5/html/Release_Notes/sect-RHNCDN_Channels.html

Samething for thr Cloud-utils Growpart (used to grow the filesystem to the size of the boot volume): This package is maintained by RedHat on the same channel.

• cloud-utils-growpart

For the latest package of the list provided by your customer, rh-amazon-rhui-client, yes, this one is Amazon specific. But it is, again, maintained by RedHat to be more integrated with AWS. If your customer doesn't use it, it will have less integration.

Hope It Helps