CentOS 7 was announced this month, and is now available on Brightbox. There are a couple of ways to get going with CentOS, depending on your requirements.
Most cloud providers require you to boot into the usual CentOS installation system, which gives you control over every little nuance of your new server but is a bit slow going, and not very “cloudy”.
Our Bootstaller system let’s you do this, if you want that level of control and we have a guide to take you through the process.
You can speed things up a bit by using a kickstart file, to answer some of the questions automatically, which feels a bit more dynamic but is still a bit of a slow process.
We’ve gone several steps further and automated this entirely to provide cloud-ready CentOS images. Whenever a new release of CentOS is made, we now auto-build a server using our kickstart config, snapshot it and publish the image.
This means there are always up-to-date CentOS images available on Brightbox which boot up ready for ssh access in less than 30 seconds.
The images are pre-installed with cloud-init, so your ssh keys are automatically installed (onto the centos user), the filesystem is grown and all the other great stuff that cloud-init does for you.
If you’re not already a customer, you can sign up in about 2 minutes and receive an automatic free £50 credit. Make sure you provide an ssh key so you can access your new CentOS servers after they’re built.
