why (not) update amis

[milanisko k]

Yesterday I debugged an installation of a pulp-server F19 node in EC2.
Of course, I hit a Selinux issue[1] which could have been solved by a
simple 'yum update -y' of the affected package. The thing is everyone
would have to do that.
Given the fact ami instances are ephemeral/disposable single-shot
entities appearing and disappearing in huge numbers with significant
frequency world-wide, such a dumb thing like updating the system right
after boot has negative impacts on many things starting from ones EC2
budget, continuing through wasting fedora content bandwidth and ending
with Carbon Dioxide pollution stemming in the CPU cycles wasted and
all of that just because the amis aren't up-to-date...

Let's preserve the planet for our children by more frequent ami respins!

--
milan
[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=877831