AMI for NixOS-23.11

Development Deployments
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I see the latest AMI (Amazon Machine Image) is for the NixOS-23.05 release.

Is there anything holding up a release for a NixOS-23.11 AMI?

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Theoretically speaking, pinging @AmineChikhaoui is part of the release process for 23.11 to start the process of creating new AMIs: Branch-off - NixOS Release Wiki.

But given the state of maintenance of our AMIs (alas), I am not very comfortable continuing this process, hence why I opened feat: remove AMI uploading of the process by RaitoBezarius Ā· Pull Request #75 Ā· NixOS/release-wiki Ā· GitHub and nixos/amazon: drop by RaitoBezarius Ā· Pull Request #269240 Ā· NixOS/nixpkgs Ā· GitHub.

@arianvp proposed himself (with the help of @tomberek) to step up and take over this work (as can be seen in those PRs).

Thatā€™s all the information I have, at the moment, on the matter. I will leave it to the people working on that to update us on the status.

cc @figsoda

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Iā€™m slowly working on fully automating the AMI upload process here GitHub - NixOS/amis: Temporary home for the soon to be official NixOS AMIs (super WIP). Aiming to have it ready for 24.05 but hopefully earlier. Different than before Iā€™ll be uploading AMIs for every channel bump. With it automated it should remove the burden on release managers to worry about uploads and AWS credentials.

Iā€™m also in contact with the infrastructure team to get my own AWS sub-account under NixOSā€™ AWS Org to start uploading these and they will then be the new official AMIs.

If @AmineChikhaoui doesnā€™t have time Iā€™m happy to help upload the 23.11 AMIs through the old processs.

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I actually donā€™t mind uploading the AMIs, itā€™s just that afaik nobody pinged me in this release.

Btw I didnā€™t follow the discussion much, is the issues with AMIs in the build process ? as the upload of AMIs is generally easy and I even attempted automating that in rewrite nixpkgs's create-amis script using Terraform by AmineChikhaoui Ā· Pull Request #254 Ā· NixOS/infra Ā· GitHub .

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Little update on this

The NixOS infra team created a new AWS account for AMIs (as we were uncomfortable giving me access to the account theyā€™re currently uploaded in as that hosts also other stuff that I donā€™t want access to at all).

They have given me access to that. And I am using it as a testing ground now to get automation in place to upload AMIs for each channel bump automatically; including a browser web page where you can find all the AMIs. However I am planning for that work to be finished for 24.05.

I can give a shot at uploading the current 23.11 AMIs to the new account when Iā€™m back from Holidays and then update the AMI ids in nixpkgs. However @AmineChikhaoui if you have time to do this and still have access to the original account itā€™d be one less thing to worry about. Sorry to hear you didnā€™t get pinged during the release process. I wasnā€™t aware of that.

By the way @AmineChikhaoui I did see your work on the terraform automation. I took at least inspiration of using github actions + OIDC to make things easy to automate. But I decided to use the AWS SDK directly instead of Terraform in the hope that I can switch to the EBS-Direct API for uploading the snapshots later. Importing the snapshot and copying them across accounts is the bottleneck and they can be made a lot faster with the EBS-direct API and Terraform doesnā€™t (and probably wonā€™t) expose it. However itā€™s all future work of course. Step 1 is to get it to work now.

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Thanks Arian!

BTW I submitted create-nixos-amis: packages nixos/maintainers/scripts/ec2/create-amis.sh by basvandijk Ā· Pull Request #277079 Ā· NixOS/nixpkgs Ā· GitHub since I also needed a way to create custom NixOS-based AMIs. Not sure if that conflicts with your work.

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Now the entrances to create AWS Ec2 is not available in Download Nix / NixOS | Nix & NixOS (the region drop down list is empty).
I think weā€™d better just rollback to NixOS 23.05 for now and update it once the 23.11 AMI is ready.

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I have a PR open to add the 23.11 AMIs. This will also fix the website.

Thereā€™s a WIP website for searching the AMIs here: NixOS Amazon Images / AMIs
These will get updated for every channel bump.

Weā€™re working on integrating this page to the main nixos website

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