How do I get the latest Amazon LInux 2 ami using Ansible? - amazon-web-services

Question

I'm using Ansible to provision AWS EC2 instances with the Amazon.Aws collection. On the cli, if I want to get the latest Amazon Linux 2 AMI I may run something like this:
$ aws ec2 describe-images \
--region us-east-1 \
--owners amazon \
--query 'reverse(sort_by(Images, &CreationDate))[:1]' \
--filters 'Name=name,Values=amzn2-ami-hvm-2.0.*-x86_64-gp2'
How do I make an equivalent query using Ansible's amazon.aws collection?
The amazon.aws.ec2_ami_info module seems to do what I want, but the provided example in the docs makes it seem like the lookup requires an OwnerId.
- name: Gather a list of all Amazon Linux \2 AMIs
amazon.aws.ec2_ami_info:
owners: 137112412989
filters:
name: amzn2-ami-hvm-*-x86_64-gp2
The OwnerId has to be retrieved with a cli command, like this:
$ aws ec2 describe-images \
--region us-east-1 \
--owners amazon \
--filters 'Name=name,Values=amzn2-ami-hvm-2.0.*-x86_64-gp2' \
--query 'reverse(sort_by(Images, &CreationDate))[:1].OwnerId' \
--output text
137112412989
The problem is, I want to run that playbook on a node that doesn't have the awscli binary. I also don't want to hardcode the OwnerId.

Answer 1

There were two missing peices - extracting the element with the most recent creation time, and specifying the owner using a name rather than the OwnerId. Here's a working solution.
- name: 'Find the latest Amazon Linux 2 AMI'
block:
- name: 'Get all Amazon Linux 2 AMIs'
amazon.aws.ec2_ami_info:
owners:
- amazon
filters:
name: amzn2-ami-hvm-*-x86_64-gp2
architecture: x86_64
block-device-mapping.volume-type: gp2
virtualization-type: hvm
register: amis
- name: Extract the most recently created AMI from the list
debug:
msg: "{{ amis.images[-1].image_id }}"
register: latest_amzl2_ami