Updating AMI IDs with PowerShell
July 2017
Windows AMI updates
Amazon release updates to their Windows AMIs monthly, within 5 business days of Microsoft’s patch Tuesday updates. Making sure you are provisioning the latest patched Windows AMI images from your scripts can be labour intensive, you have to get the latest AMI ID from either the website, AWS console, commandline or via AWS PowerShell, copy it and then update the JSON or YAML cloudformation.
Below is a script I came up with to update the AMI version using PowerShell. The script gets the latest AMI ID from AWS, then replaces it in the specified file (in the example code the file is ec2.yml). This takes out the manual step of updating the AMI ID to the latest version.
You will need:
- AWS PowerShell installed / imported
- AWS credentials set up
I do struggle with regular expressions. I’ve not used them that much throughout my career, however I find the RegExr site really handy when writing and testing.
Select-String is a useful PowerShell cmdlet, more info in the PowerShell online docs or by running
Get-Help -Name Select-String -Fullin PowerShell.
I’ve not found documentation, but from researching the AWS AMI IDs seem to follow the pattern: ami-xxxxxxxx where x is a lowercase letter or number. I will raise a support request to find this out.
update 17th July 2017
I raised support request with AWS and got an answer impressively within an hour:
Turns out only abcdef are valid letters… the 8 letters and numbers are hex.
“AMI image ID contains 12 characters. It’s made of an ‘ami’ identifier and 8 hexadecimal characters, separated by a dash. Valid image IDs range from ‘ami-00000000’ to ‘ami-ffffffff’.”
Nice, I’ve updated the regex to reflect this.