Re: RFC: EC2 "pre-patched" AMIs

On 1/20/26 16:28, Pete Wright wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 19, 2026 at 11:16:02AM -0800, Colin Percival wrote:
>>> I am not a fan of how AWS implemented SSM, and the tooling is pretty
>>> awkward as well imho.  it would be super handy to have a page listing
>>> all of the AMI's available in an easy to parse method.
>>
>> Good idea.  Which would be more useful, a single large page listing lots of
>> AMIs, or a search form?
>>
> i personally like the way that Alma linux did it in their wiki.  having a table with the AMI's listed is easier for me, but either would be sweet.  i may take a stab at automating this on my end if i end up with any cycles one of these days.

Hmm, Alma Linux has far fewer images than us... for each release, they have
an amd64 image and an arm64 image, while we have 16 (ufs vs zfs filesystem,
and "base", "small", "cloud-init" and "builder" flavours).  That's 480 AMIs
we provide for each release, or possibly more if Amazon added more regions
while I wasn't paying attention.

So it might make for a very large table, but it's certainly doable.  I don't
think a wiki is a good place for this though, just from the perspective of
wanting to make sure that nobody tampers with the list of AMIs.

-- 
Colin Percival
FreeBSD Release Engineering Lead & EC2 platform maintainer
Founder, Tarsnap | www.tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid