Date: Sat, 6 Jul 2019 00:17:51 +0000
From: Mike Crute <mike@crute.us>
To: Bob Bagwill <bobbagwill@gmail.com>
Cc: alpine-user@lists.alpinelinux.org
Subject: Re: [alpine-user] Why no official AWS AMI?
Message-ID: <20190706001749.GA17374@crute.us>
References: <CANMgWbMtwkr+r0s3KD3cauPC8Fumdc2yQPk-zj2s4C4duECkLQ@mail.gmail.com>
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On Thu, May 16, 2019 at 11:12:44AM -0400, Bob Bagwill wrote:
> Is there any particular reason why there is no official Alpine Linux
> AWS AMI?

There is a community maintained AMI available, which the maintainers
consider to be stable. The build scripts and information for discovering
the AMI IDs are on GitHub: https://github.com/mcrute/alpine-ec2-ami

We're working through some backlog items to handle automated builds and
notifications of new releases but the AMI itself is stable. Give it a
try and feel free to open GitHub issues on the tooling repo if you run
into any problems with it. There are currently x86_64 builds for 3.9.x,
3.10.x, and edge. ARM64 builds are coming soon.

Our long-term plan is to stabilize and automate the AMI building and
then work with the Alpine Linux community to hopefully make this an
official release.

Many cloud providers use cloud-init to bootstrap their instances.
cloud-init is a tool written Python that contains many different
distribution-specific backends. Unfortunately it's rather complicated to
add a backend for Alpine and none of the AMI maintainers currently have
the time to do it; also, we want to keep the image as slim as possible
so adding a bunch of Python dependencies is unappealing. We wrote our
own very lightweight version of cloud-init called tiny-ec2-bootstrap
(https://github.com/mcrute/tiny-ec2-bootstrap) which does all of the
basics and supports some minimal customization. If anyone has the time
to make cloud-init work for Alpine we'd be open to taking a patch to
integrate it. In the meantime tiny-ec2-bootstrap should work.

Pull requests and issues welcomed!

~mike


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