Re: RFC: EC2 "pre-patched" AMIs

On 1/20/26 16:59, Colin Percival wrote:
> 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.
> 

oh right that's a great point, in light of that a wiki page or webpage 
even wouldn't be very helpful.  i guess one could create a csv or JSON 
document for easy parsing...but at the end of the day it's probably 
better to create a wrapper around the appropriate AWS command, or to 
just memorize the incantation.

i don't know if its just me but this syntax has always felt awkward 
despite its power:

aws --region us-west-2 ssm get-parameters-by-path --path 
/aws/service/freebsd/amd64/base/ufs/15.0/

or

aws --region us-west-2 ssm get-parameters --name 
/aws/service/freebsd/amd64/base/ufs/15.0/RELEASE --query 
'Parameters[].Value'


i will say though after playing with this some more your suggested 
changes definitely make sense to me.

-pete

-- 
Pete Wright
pete@nomadlogic.org