Flatcar AWS AMI retention of old releases
Jeremi Piotrowski
Dear Flatcar Community,
You may be aware of our retention policy for Flatcar AMIs on AWS: https://flatcar-linux.org/docs/latest/installing/cloud/aws-ec2/#release-retention-time. In short, we commit to keeping released AMIs available for 9 months. We feel this retention policy is necessary to prevent our publishing costs from becoming unsustainable. The original VMDK disk images from which the AMIs are created are accessible on our release servers (https://stable.release.flatcar-linux.net/ etc), will be kept indefinitely, and can be used to create an AMI for older releases in your own AWS account. More information can be found here: https://flatcar-linux.org/docs/latest/installing/cloud/aws-ec2/#installation-from-a-vmdk-image
The last time a cleanup of old Flatcar images on AWS was performed was in 2020. We will shortly be activating automation to perform this cleanup more regularly. If you depend on these older releases, you may find that some old ami-ids no longer work. If this affects you, we encourage you to:
Update to a newer Flatcar release
Self-publish the required AMI in your own AWS account
If self-publishing is not an option, reach out to us on github to talk about this and we might be able to help you
Some of the releases that will be cleaned up include Flatcar Stable 2765.2.X and all Flatcar Edge releases.
Jeremi and the Flatcar Maintainers