Cloud image lifetimes

[David Gay]

Greetings!

We sort of ran out of time in today's Cloud WG meeting, but I did want to ask:

What are your thoughts on AMI lifetimes? That is to say, how long should EC2 AMIs exist before they're deleted? A few points to consider:

- AMIs only cost us for storage, so it's not a *huge* cost to maintain a public AMI
  - At the same time, there are a lot of AMIs, since we build 2-4 per AWS region per build, and that number is growing
    - There are 9 regions now, and we have 2 virtualization types, and 2 volume types, as well (9 regions * 2 * 2 = 36 AMIs per Base image build, 18 for Atomic builds (since they are only available in HVM format))
      - This total number will only grow larger as we add instance-store AMIs, and so on
- This isn't even taking into account any costs we'll have once we secure a deal with other providers like HP, Rackspace, and GCE, to maintain public images on their services

I propose we have some sort of discussion regarding how long cloud image builds should be available on services like AWS. I suspect this will resolve to having different lifetimes for scratch, test, RC, final, and maybe other build types.

Any input is appreciated. We can certainly talk about this at next week's meeting, as well.

-- David