AMI Naming Conventions

01 Sign in to the AWS Management Console.

02 Navigate to EC2 dashboard at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.

03 In the left navigation panel, under IMAGES section, choose AMIs.

04 Open the dashboard Show/Hide Columns dialog box by clicking the configuration icon: http://goo.gl/REnVAP.

05 Inside the Show/Hide Columns dialog box, under Your Tag Keys column, select the Name checkbox then click Close to return to the AMI dashboard.

06 Under Name column, check the name tag value (e.g. http://goo.gl/pyn4Xp) of each image created in the current AWS region. If one or more AMIs are not using naming conventions based on the Cloud Conformity default pattern (i.e. ^ami-(ue1|uw1|uw2|ew1|ec1|an1|an2|as1|as2|se1)-(d|t|s|p)-([a-z0-9\-]+)$) or based on a well-defined custom pattern, the naming structure of these resources does not adhere to AWS tagging best practices.

07 Change the AWS region from the navigation bar and repeat the audit process for other regions.

01 Run describe-images command (OSX/Linux/UNIX) using custom query filters to list the name tags values of the AMIs created in the selected AWS region:

aws ec2 describe-images
  --region us-east-1
  --owners self
  --output table
  --query 'Images[*].Tags'

02 The command output should return an empty table if the available images do not have name tags defined or a populated table if the images have already name tags defined, as shown in the following example:

-------------------------------
|       DescribeImages        |
+-------+---------------------+
|  Key  |        Value        |
+-------+---------------------+
|  Name |  NginxWebServerAMI  |
|  Name |  MyWebAppAPIAMI     |
+-------+---------------------+

03 Change the AWS region by updating the --region command parameter value and repeat step no. 1 and 2 to perform the audit process for other regions.

01 Sign in to the AWS Management Console.

02 Navigate to EC2 dashboard at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.

03 In the navigation panel, under IMAGES section, choose AMIs.

04 Select the AMI that you want to retag.

05 Select Tabs tab from the dashboard bottom panel and click the Add/Edit Tags button to add or change the resource Name tag.

06 In the Add/Edit Tags dialog box, perform the following actions:

1. If the selected image does not have a Name tag defined, click Create Tag button and provide the following information:
   • In the Key box type Name as the key name.
   • In the Value box enter a value for the Name tag, value that must be defined based on Cloud Conformity pattern, e.g. ami-us-east-1-p-nodejs.
2. If the selected image does have a Name tag already defined, change the tag value available in the Value box with one that follows the Cloud Conformity default pattern, e.g. ami-us-east-1-p-nodejs.
3. Click Save to apply the changes. The selected Amazon Machine Image is now tagged using an appropriate naming convention.

07 Repeat steps 4 – 6 to rename (retag) other AWS AMIs that require a valid naming convention, available in the current region.

08 Change the AWS region from the navigation bar and repeat the entire process for other regions.

01 Run describe-images command (OSX/Linux/UNIX) using custom filters to list the IDs of the AMIs tagged without using an appropriate naming convention (see Audit section part II to identify the invalid Name tag values). The following command example expose the ID of an AWS AMI tagged with Name=NginxWebServerAMI, available in the US East-1 region:

aws ec2 describe-images
  --region us-east-1
  --filters "Name=tag:Name,Values=NginxWebServerAMI"
  --query 'Images[*].ImageId'

02 The command output should return the ID of the image identified by the Name tag value:

[
	"ami-67bbcf70"
]

03 Run create-tags command (OSX/Linux/UNIX) using the image ID returned at the previous step as identifier to add or overwrite the Name tag value for the specified AWS AMI. The following command example overwrites the Name tag value of an AMI with the ID ami-67bbcf70, created in the US East-1 region. The tag value used, i.e. ami-us-east-1-p-apache-spark, follows a well-defined naming convention based on the Cloud Conformity recommended pattern (the command does not return an output):

aws ec2 create-tags
  --region us-east-1
  --resources ami-67bbcf70
  --tags Key=Name,Value=ami-us-east-1-p-apache-spark

04 Repeat steps no. 1 - 3 to retag other images that require a valid naming convention, available in the current region.

05 Repeat steps no. 1 - 4 to implement the entire process for other AWS regions.