Deploy on AWS

AWS requires bare-metal instances to expose KVM. EC2 nested virt is not supported on standard instances. This means:

• More expensive than GCP (~3×)
• Requires a vCPU service-quota request (default is 0 for metal-* families)

Quota request (do this first)

In the AWS Console → Service Quotas → Amazon EC2:

• For Intel: Running On-Demand High Memory instances and L-1216C47A (Running On-Demand Standard instances). Request 72 vCPUs minimum.
• For Graviton: same workflow, but request quota for c7g.metal (cheaper).

Approval is usually 24h.

Prereqs

• AWS CLI (aws configure)
• A VPC + subnet (the script creates one if missing)

Deploy

./deploy/deploy-aws.sh

Provisions:

• c5n.metal (72 vCPU, 192 GiB) in us-east-1a
• VPC + subnet + internet gateway + security group
• Same cloud-init bootstrap as GCP

Total time: ~15 minutes (bare-metal POST is slow).

Cost

For dev, use GCP — there's no cost-effective small bare-metal SKU on AWS.

Graviton (ARM) caveat

c7g.metal is ARM. Templates must be built for linux/arm64. The default registry templates are multi-arch, so this works out of the box.

Custom AMI

If you need to bake the OS image:

./deploy/deploy-aws.sh --build-ami

Produces a private AMI (ami-pandastack-XXXX) for faster repeated provisioning.

Tearing down

./deploy/deploy-aws.sh --destroy