Daemonic Dispatches

FreeBSD/EC2 AMI Systems Manager Public Parameters

In June, I posted a EC2 Wishlist with three entries: "AWS Systems Manager Public Parameters", "BootMode=polyglot", and "Attaching multiple IAM Roles to an EC2 instance". I am happy to say that my first wish has been granted!

The necessary flags were recently set within AWS, and a few days ago I added code to FreeBSD's build system to register 14.0-CURRENT AMI Ids as Public Parameters. (I'll be merging this code to 13-STABLE and 12-STABLE in the coming weeks.) I've also "backfilled" the parameters for releases from 12.0 onwards.

This means that you can now

$ aws --region us-east-1 ssm get-parameter
    --name /aws/service/freebsd/arm64/base/ufs/13.0/RELEASE |
    jq -r '.Parameter.Value'
ami-050cc11ac34def94b

(using the jq tool to extract the Value field from the JSON blog returned by the AWS CLI) to look up the arm64 AMI for 13.0-RELEASE, and also

$ aws ec2 run-instances
    --image-id resolve:ssm:/aws/service/freebsd/arm64/base/ufs/13.0/RELEASE
    ... more command line options here ...

to look up the AMI and launch an instance — no more grepping the release announcement emails to find the right AMI Id for your region! Assuming everything works as expected, this will also be very useful for anyone who wants to run the latest STABLE or CURRENT images, since every time a new weekly snapshot is published the Public Parameter will be updated.

Many thanks to David and Arthur at AWS for their assistance in liaising with the Systems Manager team — I wouldn't have been able to do this without them!

This work was supported by my FreeBSD/EC2 Patreon; if you find it useful, please consider contributing so that I have more "funded hours" to spend on FreeBSD/EC2 work.

blog comments powered by Disqus