Does Amazon EC2 Builder do any OS file cleanup?

Packer
1

I’ve been looking into doing some of my first-boot config through user_data and cloud-init directives instead of an Ansible playbook.

I noticed my new hosts from a Packer AMI ends up with artifacts from the Packer build process in /var/lib/cloud/. Am I missing a config of Packer that would cleanup these files from a previous boot/build?

Looking at AWS ImageBuilder docs, they appear to have a scripted cleanup in the Best Practices. I honestly assumed this to be core functionality to a Builder process; leave it like you found it.

Is that a mistaken expectation? Is it all left to the user when it comes to Packer Builders?

EDIT: Reading more I realize that OS-level changes is going to be in a Provisioner. Am I missing a pattern in this?

2

Yes you will need to do any necessary cleanup - Packer doesn’t know what you’ve done & what needs keeping.

I think for cloud-init the command is: sudo cloud-init clean --logs