Unpublishing old EC2 AMIs
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Date: Tue, 06 May 2025 23:16:21 UTC
Hi everyone (in particular EC2 users), FreeBSD is now publishing 34 EC2 AMIs every week: 2 (amd64,arm64) for 13.5-STABLE, and 16 each (amd64,arm64/ufs,zfs/base,builder,cloud-init,small) for 14.3-STABLE and 15.0-CURRENT. Across all the AWS regions, this adds up to 5 TB of disk snapshots per week; while Amazon has been quite generous in sponsoring FreeBSD's release engineering AWS account, I don't want to impose unnecessary costs, especially since many of those weekly snapshot images never get used. I do plan on keeping: * All of the *-RELEASE images, in all regions * AMIs less than 2 months old, in all regions * AMIs which have been launched in the past year (in the region where they were launched), * Every AMI in the us-west-2 and us-east-1 regions. That last one is because it's not-infrequently useful to look at old images to see when a bug was introduced or when behaviour changed; I'm keeping the images in us-east-1 because that's the original (and for some purposes still "default") region, and in us-west-2 because that's where a lot of new instance types first become available (hence it's important for any pre-launch testing I do). At some point we might start reaping old GCE/Azure/Oracle/etc images as well, but we don't publish nearly so many of those so I'm not in any great rush. -- Colin Percival FreeBSD Release Engineering Lead & EC2 platform maintainer Founder, Tarsnap | www.tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid