Question

A SysOps administrator manages a fleet of EC2 instances launched from custom AMIs. The team wants to automatically create a new AMI from a designated 'builder' instance every night, tag it with the build date, and then deregister any AMIs (and delete their associated snapshots) that are older than 30 days to control costs. The solution must be fully serverless and require no standing infrastructure. Which approach best meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Author an AWS Systems Manager Automation runbook that creates and tags the AMI and deregisters/deletes AMIs older than 30 days, and trigger it on a nightly schedule using an Amazon EventBridge scheduled rule.

Answer

Create an EC2 Image Builder pipeline with a distribution configuration and rely on its built-in retention policy to delete old AMIs.

Answer

Configure an SSM State Manager association with a cron schedule that runs the AWS-CreateImage document and enables an AMI lifecycle policy to purge old images.

Answer

Use Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM) with an EBS snapshot lifecycle policy to create the AMI nightly and expire snapshots after 30 days.