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Support AL2023 minimal AMI

Open injust opened this issue 3 months ago • 1 comments

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Tell us about your request

Provide AL2023 minimal AMIs as managed images, or clarify that they already work as custom images.

Tell us about the problem you're trying to solve. What are you trying to do, and why is it hard?

EC2 Image Builder doesn't provide the AL2023 minimal AMIs as managed images, so you have to use them as custom AMIs. However, the image recipe creation UI says this about using custom AMIs:

The SSM Agent must be pre-installed in the selected AMI.

The AL2023 minimal AMI doesn't come with amazon-ssm-agent, according to https://docs.aws.amazon.com/linux/al2023/ug/image-comparison.html.

Are you currently working around this issue?

My image recipes using AL2023 minimal AMIs seem to work properly, however I don't know if I'm missing something.

injust avatar Oct 05 '25 20:10 injust

Custom parent AMIs should work as long as they either:

  1. Come with the Amazon SSM Agent pre-installed.
  2. Have something (e.g. cloud-init) that executes EC2 user data scripts on instance startup.

AL2023 minimal works as a parent AMI since it still comes with cloud-init. EC2 Image Builder defaults the EC2 user data for build instances to a shell script that installs the Amazon SSM Agent. This is buried in the CreateImageRecipe documentation for the additionalInstanceConfiguration.userDataOverride request field:

userDataOverride

Use this property to provide commands or a command script to run when you launch your build instance.

The userDataOverride property replaces any commands that Image Builder might have added to ensure that Systems Manager is installed on your Linux build instance. If you override the user data, make sure that you add commands to install Systems Manager, if it is not pre-installed on your base image.

EC2 Image Builer - API Reference - AdditionalInstanceConfiguration

The user guide should probably mention this somewhere.

commiterate avatar Oct 11 '25 20:10 commiterate