Migrating from physical Red Hat to EC2 virtualised CentOS/other

I am migrating a classic LAMP application from Red Hat 5.3 to EC2, and cannot find a CentOS 5.3 image in the community to meet my needs. I don't have time to roll my own AMI. Creating my own repo and updating Amazon's stock Fedora 8 has so far proved difficult, and I am concerned that using it as a base will expose security holes, although the kernel has been updated to 2.6.21.7-2.

1. Can anybody recommend a RHEL5.3 binary compatible AMI?
2. If not, where is the information on backported security fixes to the Fedora 8 repo? I was under the impression it had reached EOL.

The idea of running Fedora 8 in production is abhorrent to me - can anybody explain why it's offered by Amazon and whether it's suitably patched?

From serverfault Andy

• Use a CentOS 5.4 image, it should work just fine. The minor point releases of RHEL/CentOS are inconsequential to most average folks, they're just bugfixes and slightly updates packages but in general 100% compatible.

  http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?externalID=3612&categoryID=208

  There are a few other variants if you search for CentOS 5.4.

  From troyengel

• How about using the Amazon AMI?

  http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?threadID=51647&tstart=15

  Andy : This certainly looks good, what are your experiences of it? Will spin one up and investigate.

  rquillo : I've been using Ubuntu AMI's so not much yet on this. Let us know how it goes.

  Andy : Although this is still in beta and not quite fully featured enough (missing nginx, memcached, some php libs) it's the closest image I can find. While not using it now, I'll certainly migrate to it in the future. Thanks!
  From rquillo

• Without rolling your own AMI you've got three options:
  - The RightScale CentOS images are sortof the defacto ones
  - Amazon just started their own distro which is basically a parallel-fork of CentOS 5
  - Actually pay for the official RHEL AMIs

  From cagenut