Re: New FreeBSD/EC2 AMIs: "small" flavour

On 9/2/24 08:19, Pete Wright wrote:
> this seems like a good idea from my POV as an admin.  Although I think it may 
> be helpful to keep the AWS CLI install on boot step in some use-cases.  My 
> general workflow is to use packer to build a site specific AMI where I install 
> our specific configs and run freebsd-update then disable it on subsequent 
> boots.  My goal in those scenarios is to improve first-boot time for 
> auto-scaling.
> 
> When I do use "vanilla" AMI's its usually for a research/testing/debugging 
> task so having the awscli get installed on firstboot would save me some hassle 
> of having to do that by hand.  It's certainly not a deal breaker though, just 
> my two bits.

The "small" AMIs still have firstboot-pkgs installed, so you can launch the
image with a user-data file of

 >>/etc/rc.conf
firstboot_pkgs_list="devel/py-awscli"

and it will install that package for you.  I just figured that if people
wanted "small" then it made sense to change the default.

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