Can Atlassian provide a richer default AMI for ElasticBamboo?

[Robert Watkins]

Given the snafu with the Elastic AMI for Bamboo 5, and not being able to install common new packages, would it be possible for Atlassian to provide AMIs that come configured with some of the more popular extensions?

For example:

* firefox - for use with Selenium testing

* PHP

* PostgressSQL

Failing that, can you make sure that the examples listed on https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/AOD/Populating+your+EBS+volume actually work?

[Robert Watkins · Accepted solution]

Sorry for the attitude - I came down a bit snarky when I realised I'd have to spend my evening getting the build environment working again.

Anyway, I was thinking about this - and I think what you should do is crowdsource it.

• Add the ability to define a capability via a Chef or Puppet recipe
• Have a library of recipes already pre-defined - the existing capabiliites are a good candidate for that
• Have a community-maintained library of additional recipies - things like Firefox, etc, can be added to that
• Have a testing image that can be used to verify these recipies - an image that _doesn't_ shut itself down if it's not started by Bamboo, or that dies an hour after being started. Heck, make it a Vagrant script so it can be tested locally
• Have a way of adding custom recipes - upload them to the Bamboo instance, or pull them down via source control, or whatever.

Going recipe-based would make setting up an image a lot easier. Plus it would give you an option to bake a custom image directly from the Bamboo isntance, thus saving on start-up time.

Okay, that was my feature suggestion. I'm off to spend my evening trying to get Firefox installed again. (I meant it when I said you need to update the doco - that's been broken for months now)

[Nelson Silva]

I've just started working on a solution to make custom Elastic Bamboo Images here https://github.com/inevo/bamboo-elastic-image-packer It uses Packer (http://www.packer.io/) with some simple shell and chef provisioners. I'm using an Ubuntu Cloud AMI as base and the Makefile will only work on Ubuntu for now. I also added a simple Vagrantfile that reads Packer's config so I can test the provisioning locally. I'm extending it as needed for our own images but it should be easy to add/remove capabilities. Hope you find it usefull.

[Przemek Bruski]

We think we already have way too many images.

We may come up with a better way of setting up the image (like providing some checkboxes that would let you choose what ends up on an instance).

With Bamboo 5.1, we will have an Ubuntu image - it's far easier to set up firefox on it.

We are also thinking of making the image upgrades opt-in - i.e. you would be able to keep your old image after upgrade.