AWS EC2 Deployment & AMI Automation

Engineering challenge

EC2 deployment and image preparation included manual steps for instance creation, parameter handling, and AMI creation. The workflow needed more consistent execution and a reliable handoff between scripts.

Architecture & design

• Create or identify an EC2 instance through a release script.
• Return the instance identifier as shell environment variables for downstream image-build steps.
• Expose dry-run, reboot, and wait behavior as explicit operator controls.

Implementation

• Created and versioned a set of EC2 release scripts.
• Extended instance creation to return an Instance ID for subsequent AMI steps.
• Added `dry-run`, `no-reboot`, and `wait` options.
• Removed reliance on Bash 4 associative arrays to keep the scripts compatible with the default Bash 3.2 on macOS.
• Investigated KMS, EC2 DescribeInstances, IAM policy, and SSM connectivity errors.

Validation & impact

• The scripts have version-control, syntax-check, and help-output validation records.
• CLI usage, instance lifecycle handling, and local shell compatibility were reviewed.

Limitations & next steps

• End-to-end AMI build, Auto Scaling rollout, target-group health check, and rollback drills are not confirmed for every service.
• No measured deployment-time, cost, or failure-rate improvements are available.