Finding AWS virtual machine images

MDBCI stores various information about every provided box - it's provider, distribution, architecture, etc. You can find that information into configuration/boxes/ directory.

Every AWS box requires AMI (Amazon Machine Image) id. There is several ways to find the desired image.

1. Looking at official distributions wiki

Many popular linux distributions have a detailed page with official AMI ids. There is list of these pages:

2. Using AWS-CLI tool

AWS-CLI is a powerfull tool for managing AWS services. The following steps will show you how to find the desired AMI using this tool.

  1. Install the tool with pip install awscli command
  2. Configure the tool with the aws configure command. It will require you to enter amazon access_key_id, secret_access_key and the output format (json / yaml / text / table)
  3. To find AMI id execute
aws ec2 describe-images \
   --owners 309956199498 \
   --query 'Images[*].[CreationDate,Name,ImageId, Architecture]' \
   --filters "Name=name,Values=RHEL-7.?*GA*" \
   --region us-east-1 \
   --output table | sort -r

Where:

  • --owners - image owner id
  • --query - describes output values
  • --filters - AMI filter parameters
  • --region - aws region
  • --output - output format

Refer to aws-cli filter usage page, describe-images command page for detailed command info

List of known owners id:

  • Amazon Marketplace - 679593333241
  • RHEL - 309956199498
  • Ubuntu - 099720109477
  • SUSE - 013907871322
  • Debian - 136693071363
  • Rocky Linux - 792107900819

Also you can get detail information about AMI by executing aws ec2 describe-images --image-ids ami-07a44bb660e25b065 command.