Philosophy

The server AMIs are base installs built with the minimal Ubuntu or Debian system. No assumption is made about your intended purpose or desired software choices. Given that this is Ubuntu/Debian, it is generally trivial to turn a base install into a web, database, or email server, complete LAMP system, or just about any other application.

The desktop AMIs are provided as experimental systems. It takes over an hour to install the Ubuntu desktop on EC2, so I figured it would be nice to give folks a chance to try one out without this wait.