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

On Mon, Sep 02, 2024 at 10:22:37AM UTC, Colin Percival wrote:
> 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.
> 

yep i understand and it makes sense.  for my personal workflow having the awscli
is a hard requirement, but as you mention installing it is trvial.

-pete