On 07/09/2013 08:53 PM, Jimmy Kaplowitz wrote:
FWIW, Google deprecates images and kernels in its cloud in a way that's visible to both users and APIs for a while before removing them, even when security vulnerabilities exist (of course we fix those in newer builds and provide release notes). We also have a way for gcutil users to request the newest squeeze or wheezy image, hide older images for each version by default, include the image date in the image name, and sometimes release more than one image revision per Debian release (e.g. to tune performance or integrate newer Google tools).
Nice. It would be great if EC2 could... - Provide a way to send notices to customers who are running or who have recently run a specific AMI. - Provide a way to hide an AMI from general searches, but leave it available for people to run if they already know the id and reference it. - Provide a way for people to run the "latest" AMI in a "series" however one wished to define those. - Provide a way for an AMI publisher to know if the AMI is actively being used. - Show the date an AMI was created. ...but they don't.I submitted these requests about 6 years ago back when I was building community Ubuntu AMIs, but they haven't gotten around to implementing them yet :-/
Therefore, you have to make some tough decisions about if and how to phase out AMIs.
It's especially tough since you really can't communicate with the users of your AMIs.
They don't read your documentation, don't subscribe to your mailing lists, don't visit your IRC channels, don't read the motd, and will be very upset when the AMI they have been running their business on for years suddenly disappears with no warning.
My personal decision was to never delete an AMI unless it had a serious known security hole that could be exploited over the network. So, I have many hundreds of public AMIs that people may or may not still be depending on. I hope they are not being used since they are mostly for Ubuntu releases that are past end of life, but I didn't feel comfortable making the decision for them that their business should grind to a halt.
-- Eric Hammond http://Alestic.com