Running BottleRocket on AWS outpost Server... ( with no EBS )

[mrpackethead]

Hi,

I've recently installed an Arm64 single U AWS Outpost Server. I had planned to run BottleRocket with ECS, but have discovered that because this outpost has no EBS, you can't install it. Below is the reply from AWS support.

I'm just not getting this, and the alternative for me, is to run AL2023, which I can think of a whole lot of reasons why I don't' want to do that.

Does anyone have any ideas about how I could craft an image that would work with an Outpost Server?

Hello Andrew,

xxxxxxxxxx here from AWS Support. Thank you for your patience as we work to assist you.

I have tested this in my test AWS cloud environment (not in outpost), and could see the AMI “ami-08cb23da81e4176a6” that is failing with the error creates two volumes. One root volume and one secondary EBS volume.

I have an update from the internal team as below:

The Outposts you have ordered is a single 1U server. It has no EBS provisioned and cannot have EBS. Hence, you won’t be able to launch an AMI that requires EBS.

[+] https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/servers/features/?nc=sn&loc=2#product-features#aws-outposts-servers-features#compute-and-storage

Q: Will it work with this Bottlerocket AMI "ami-08cb23da81e4176a6"?
No.

So in summary, this AMI is requiring you to provision a secondary EBS volume, hence this is not usable with this single 1U server as it doesn’t support EBS.

[mrpackethead]

Futher to this;
"You must use an Amazon EBS-backed AMI with only a single EBS snapshot. AMIs with more than one EBS snapshot are not supported."
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/outposts/latest/server-userguide/launch-instance.html#launch-instances

[bcressey]

The Bottlerocket AMIs should work but require a custom block device mapping at launch to suppress the second EBS volume.

Something along these lines should work:

aws ec2 run-instances \
  --region "${REGION}" \
  --image-id "${IMAGE_ID}" \
  --instance-type "${INSTANCE_TYPE}" \
  --user-data "file://${USER_DATA}" \
  --block-device-mapping '[{"DeviceName":"/dev/xvdb","NoDevice":""}]' \
  ...

[mrpackethead]

Did'tn seem to work sadly.

@mrpackethead ➜ /workspaces/mrpacketheads (rpki) $ aws ec2 run-instances --region ap-southeast-2 --image-id ami-08cb23da81e4176a6 --instance-type c6gd.2xlarge --block-device-mapping '[{"DeviceName":"/dev/xvdb","NoDevice":""}]' --subnet-id subnet-0xxxxxxxx3e --profile network

An error occurred (UnsupportedOperation) when calling the RunInstances operation: The size of the AMI is larger than the EBS block device mapping storage. Specify a smaller AMI and try again.

[bcressey]

Please try this so that xvda is at least as large as all of the snapshots in the AMI:

--block-device-mapping '[{"DeviceName":"/dev/xvda","Ebs":{"VolumeSize":60}},{"DeviceName":"/dev/xvdb","NoDevice":""}]'

[mrpackethead]

Ok, so that deployed. :-) I guess now i shoudl test if i can sucessfully deploy tasks on it