This Ansible role provides a fully automated way to create a custom Rocky Linux AMI for the AWS Cloud environment. Unlike most other AMI creation programs this role does not derive an existing AMI where additional packages and configuration files would be added. The AMI is created from scratch by partitioning a disk and installing the operating system using packages from the official Rocky Linux repositories. This allows to have a custom disk layout with LVM (Logical Volume Manager) and to control all packages which are going to be installed in order to get a really minimal system.
The disk layout is based on LVM as it is very useful for allocating the disk space and it can be quite important on stateful instances such as database servers to make sure there is still space for data even if logs are growing a lot. The image will come with cloud-init in order to configure the SSH key which is selected at launch time. Also it will automatically grow the LVM Physical-Volume so all the disk space in the EBS volume of the instance can be allocated to grow the root file system or create other file systems with LVM. Important AWS utilities such as awscli and python2-boto are also installed as they are very often involved in the bootstapping process.
This Ansible role comes with the following requirements:
- Ansible 2.10.0 or more recent
- An AWS Account where to execute the creation of the AMI
- An access key pair with enough privileges to execute ec2 and cloudformation operations
- Permission to launch an official Rocky Linux v9 AMI from the AWS Marketplace The best thing to do is to manually create a t3.micro to t4g.micro instance and to destroy it immediately as this process will ask for the permission to launch such instances in your AWS Account: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-ygp66mwgbl2ii
This Ansible role works by first using Cloud Formations to create a temporary stack in your AWS Account which contains a VPC and an EC2 instance. This instance is running an official Rocky Linux image and the new Rocky Linux operating system will be installed on a secondary empty EBS volume. At the end of the installation the instance is stopped and the new AMI is created as an image of the secondary volume. The stack and all its resources are destroyed and only the new AMI and its corresponding EBS snapshot remain.
- Install this role using ansible-galaxy https://galaxy.ansible.com/fdupoux/rockylinux_ami_builder
- Manually create an EC2 an instance from an official Rocky Linux AMI to authorize the use of these AMI in your AWS account
- Use this role from an ansible playbook and make sure you pass all the important parameters which are defined in the defaults/main.yml file. Please have a look at the example playbook provided in the docs folder for examples of parameters that can be used for x86_64 and arm64.
This Ansible role can produce Rocky Linux v9 AMI for both x86_64 and arm64. These AMI can be used with modern instance types such as t3/t3a and t4g. The AMI is configured to have both IPv4 and IPv6 enabled. On x86_64 it boots the system in Legacy BIOS mode, and on arm64 it boots in UEFI mode, as these are the default boot modes with AWS for these two architectures.
This role has been tested using Ansible 2.10.7 as provided with Debian 11 which is not very recent, hence it does not require a very recent version of Ansible for this to work. It should naturally also work with more recent versions of Ansible.
The creation of an AMI for x86_64 has been tested using a "t3.small" instance, and an AMI for arm64 has been created using a "t4g.small" instance. These two instance types come with modern features and are affordable. This should also work on other modern instance types, but may not work with older instance types such as t1 and t2.