4 ms·
This is an interesting thought; I use Windows instances myself but I use a custom AMI built using Packer on our CI server. Presumably Amazon doesn't have a pool
by gtsteve 8y ago
This is an interesting thought; I use Windows instances myself but I use a custom AMI built using Packer on our CI server. Presumably Amazon doesn't have a pool of my custom AMI images lying around.
So I wonder if the custom AMI is actually stored as a layer on top of the source Windows AMI and applied to the instance from the pool before it is made available to me.
Alternatively, it means I'm missing out on an optimisation and I could get a faster start-up time by using a vanilla Windows AMI and installing dependencies in the user data.
Does anyone know or have an educated guess?
- maxaf 8y agoA couple of jobs ago I have spent plenty of time optimizing a Packer-based AMI pipeline that was similar in spirit to that which you've described. It was all quite frustrating, but then the job got yanked from underneath me, so I never finished solving the problem. The article contains a screenshot[1] of a response from AWS support indicating that only EC2's own AMIs benefit from this pooling optimization. It follows that custom AMIs must take the startup time hit all the way. [1]: https://maishsk.com/blog/images/20190307_aws_ec2_secret/forum_post_slow.png https://maishsk.com/blog/images/20190307_aws_ec2_secret/foru...
- gtsteve 8y agoAh, I had missed that! Thank you, that's very helpful to know. I always learn something new every day here.