7.3. Preparing an image for your cloud
Amazon Machine Images (AMI) are required because various image formats cannot be used directly by AWS. You may use the AMIs that Red Hat has provided, or you can manually import your own images. The AMI must exist before the EC2 instance can be provisioned. You will need a valid AMI ID so that the correct RHEL version needed for the compute machines is selected.
7.3.1. Listing latest available RHEL images on AWS
AMI IDs correspond to native boot images for AWS. Because an AMI must exist before the EC2 instance is provisioned, you will need to know the AMI ID before configuration. The AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) is used to list the available Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) image IDs.
Prerequisites
- You have installed the AWS CLI.
Procedure
Use this command to list RHEL 7.9 Amazon Machine Images (AMI):
$ aws ec2 describe-images --owners 309956199498 \ 1 --query 'sort_by(Images, &CreationDate)[*].[CreationDate,Name,ImageId]' \ 2 --filters "Name=name,Values=RHEL-7.9*" \ 3 --region us-east-1 \ 4 --output table 5
- 1
- The
--ownerscommand option shows Red Hat images based on the account ID309956199498.重要This account ID is required to display AMI IDs for images that are provided by Red Hat.
- 2
- The
--querycommand option sets how the images are sorted with the parameters'sort_by(Images, &CreationDate)[*].[CreationDate,Name,ImageId]'. In this case, the images are sorted by the creation date, and the table is structured to show the creation date, the name of the image, and the AMI IDs. - 3
- The
--filtercommand option sets which version of RHEL is shown. In this example, since the filter is set by"Name=name,Values=RHEL-7.9*", then RHEL 7.9 AMIs are shown. - 4
- The
--regioncommand option sets where the region where an AMI is stored. - 5
- The
--outputcommand option sets how the results are displayed.
When creating a RHEL compute machine for AWS, ensure that the AMI is RHEL 7.9.
Example output
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | DescribeImages | +---------------------------+----------------------------------------------------+-----------------------+ | 2020-05-13T09:50:36.000Z | RHEL-7.9_HVM_BETA-20200422-x86_64-0-Hourly2-GP2 | ami-038714142142a6a64 | | 2020-09-18T07:51:03.000Z | RHEL-7.9_HVM_GA-20200917-x86_64-0-Hourly2-GP2 | ami-005b7876121b7244d | | 2021-02-09T09:46:19.000Z | RHEL-7.9_HVM-20210208-x86_64-0-Hourly2-GP2 | ami-030e754805234517e | +---------------------------+----------------------------------------------------+-----------------------+
Additional resources
- You may also manually import RHEL images to AWS.
