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Building a high-performance remote desktop with CentOS 8 Stream on Amazon EC2

CentOS Dojo Oct - 2021

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davdunc@amazon.com

@davdunc

David Duncan— Partner Solutions Architect

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Personal Introduction

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About Me

I am:

  • not an analyst
  • Solutions Architect and Strategist

I enjoy:

  • Working on Fedora and CentOS cloud images
  • HAM Radio (KI5AWZ - on the air)
  • Dog Training

David Duncan

  • Amazon
  • Dog Training
  • New! HAM Radio

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Motivation

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Precedence

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Building Blocks

CentOS Stream 8

The Nice-DCV application for VDI

Nice-DCV is free to use when it is used on Amazon EC2 Instances

  • Exiting options for the Accelerated Instance types.

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Targeting an Instance Type

Accelerated Computing

General Purpose

Compute Optimized

Storage Optimized

Memory Optimized

build AMIs for each of these solutions as needed.

  • most of them are satisfied by one image.
  • for accelerated computing, there are concerns related to the various options for hardware acceleration (AMD, NVidia, Inferentia, FPGA)

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)

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The EC2 Image Builder

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A Pipeline for building AMIs and Container Images

us-east-1

Git Repository or Version Control

Amazon EC2 Image Builder

Relevant change set

documents

Alarm

Instance

AMI

af-south-1

us-east-2

us-west-2

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The Parts of an Image Builder Pipeline

Pipelines have Image recipes

Image Recipes have Components

  • Build Components
  • Test Components

Image Recipes Build AMIs and use Distribution Configurations

Distribution Configurations

  • Assign Permissions
  • Copy Images to one or more Regions
  • Copy Images to one or more Partition(!)
  • Share Images for use by other accounts

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Requires the SSM Agent

#cloud-config

packages:

- python3

runcmd:

- ['sudo', 'dnf', 'install', '-y', 'https://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads-windows/SSMAgent/latest/linux_amd64/amazon-ssm-agent.rpm']

- ['sudo', 'systemctl', 'enable', 'amazon-ssm-agent']

- ['sudo', 'systemctl', 'start', 'amazon-ssm-agent']

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This is part of the Image Recipe

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  • Freely available for use on EC2 Instances
  • Updated tools for fleet management available

Nice-DCV isn’t free as in freedom. It’s free as in beer when you use it on Amazon EC2.

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Let’s Review it in the Console

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Questions?

https://github.com/davdunc/centos-with-nice-dcv