Re: Question regarding to the status of Debian 11 (bullseye) AMIs

[Noah Meyerhans <noahm@debian.org>]

On Wed, Feb 07, 2024 at 05:30:33AM +0000, yu, bing wrote:
>    This is Bing Yu, a software engineer from NetApp. I am working on a
>    project using Debian 11 and I realised our official Debian 11 (bullseye)
>    AMIs for Amazon EC2 hasn’t been updated since Oct
>    2023[1]https://wiki.debian.org/Cloud/AmazonEC2Image/Bullseye

Actually it was updated in January 2024.  The current version is:

{
    "Images": [
        {
            "Architecture": "x86_64",
            "CreationDate": "2024-01-04T12:38:38.000Z",
            "ImageId": "ami-05934380da12ae70b",
            "ImageLocation": "amazon/debian-11-amd64-20240104-1616",
            "ImageType": "machine",
            "Public": true,
            "OwnerId": "136693071363",
            "PlatformDetails": "Linux/UNIX",
            "UsageOperation": "RunInstances",
            "State": "available",
            "BlockDeviceMappings": [
                {
                    "DeviceName": "/dev/xvda",
                    "Ebs": {
                        "DeleteOnTermination": true,
                        "SnapshotId": "snap-0c1bae2347add6f31",
                        "VolumeSize": 8,
                        "VolumeType": "gp2",
                        "Encrypted": false
                    }
                }
            ],
            "Description": "Debian 11 (20240104-1616)",
            "EnaSupport": true,
            "Hypervisor": "xen",
            "ImageOwnerAlias": "amazon",
            "Name": "debian-11-amd64-20240104-1616",
            "RootDeviceName": "/dev/xvda",
            "RootDeviceType": "ebs",
            "SriovNetSupport": "simple",
            "VirtualizationType": "hvm",
            "DeprecationTime": "2026-01-04T12:38:38.000Z"
        }
    ]
}

There are no pending updates to packages on this AMI.

In general, the wiki is the least reliable source of AMI details.  While
the content on it is machine generated, actually updating it still
involves a manual copy & paste process, and sometimes that is missed.
The AWS SSM public parameter store gets updated automatically with the
AMI publication process and is much more reliable.  Try, for example, 

aws --region us-west-2 ssm get-parameter --name /aws/service/debian/release/11/latest/amd64

>    Debian community used maintained this AMI more frequently but that doesn’t
>    seem to be the case anymore. Consider Debian 11 is still active version of
>    Debian, do we still expect an update on Debian 11 (bullseye) AMIs for
>    Amazon EC2 coming soon? 

There is another image update coming in the next week or so for the
upcoming Debian 11 point release.  In general, the AMIs are updated
whenever one of the bundled packages is updated.

noah