feat: remove AMI uploading of the process

[RaitoBezarius]

AMI uploading has been painful for the release management community as the AWS maintenance story in nixpkgs has been degrading, we propose to stop doing this for 24.05 just after the 23.11 process.

Related PR: NixOS/nixpkgs#269240.

cc @AmineChikhaoui @arianvp @figsoda @zimbatm

[arianvp]

Thanks for the mention.

I'm okay with removing it from the instructions if it's a burden to people. OTOh I'm willing to put time to make the story better. But I'll do that as a flake in nix-community at first. And we can reconsider adding it again later?

[RaitoBezarius]

Thanks for the mention.

I'm okay with removing it from the instructions if it's a burden to people. OTOh I'm willing to put time to make the story better. But I'll do that as a flake in nix-community at first. And we can reconsider adding it again later?

That would work perfectly for me!

[drupol]

I would be sad to not have NixOS Amazon AMIs, but if it's a temporary removal, it's fine. If you have an alternative on how to spawn an Amazon EC2 vm with NixOS, let me know!

[RaitoBezarius]

I would be sad to not have NixOS Amazon AMIs, but if it's a temporary removal, it's fine. If you have an alternative on how to spawn an Amazon EC2 vm with NixOS, let me know!

I strongly recommend nixos-anywhere with any AMI you prefer :P.

[arianvp]

Is there a summary of what exactly is difficult with the upload process though? We've been using (a slightly modified version of ) the upload script at work for a while and we use it to upload our own AMIs daily. What exactly is not working and causing a burden?. Also the nixos modules have never really regressed for us. they've worked for years with no issues. (Can't talk about zfs).

I don't see a big burden adding myself as maintainer to the nixos module code. I just miss context of what exactly is the burden on the release process here.

Don't want to question it so you can remove it as a step; but i'd advocate for keeping the code in nixpkgs. (Out of self-interest; I need to keep maintaining it anyway for work purposes. so I'd prefer to maintain it in-tree)

[drupol]

Another thing...
I'm also thinking about people working on facilitating the adoption on Nix/NixOS at work for example, if those images are not available on Amazon and if in order to install it, you need to use a contrib project, I don't think this is going to facilitate anything, unfortunately.

[tomberek]

I would prefer to keep having an AMI that is official (for some definition of official TBD). I used to maintain AMIs for us-gov regions and it didn't seem too bad. @arianvp , let me know if you run into issues or need an additional maintainer.

[RaitoBezarius]

Given that people have stepped up to do its maintenance, I think we can explore another PR where we streamline this process and take it off from the RM plate. Let's see how it goes for 24.05.

[imincik]

Thanks for keeping AMIs, I use them as well.

[nixos-discourse]

This pull request has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/ami-for-nixos-23-11/36860/2