AMI Support Policy
Why AMIs are refreshed periodically
AWS automatically deprecates public AMIs two years after their original
publish date. Deprecated AMIs still exist and can still be launched by
explicit AMI ID, but they are excluded from DescribeImages results by
default — meaning Terraform aws_ami data sources, Packer
source_ami_filter blocks, and the EC2 console "Browse AMIs" search will
no longer return them unless the caller explicitly opts in to deprecated
images (include_deprecated = true in Terraform, --include-deprecated
on the AWS CLI).
fck-nat ships infrequent releases — the project is largely feature-complete
and security patches arrive via dnf auto-update, not new package
versions. To keep the latest released version discoverable past AWS's
two-year wall, fck-nat re-publishes refreshed AMIs of the latest minor
version on a fixed cadence.
Refresh cadence
The latest released minor version is rebuilt and re-published every six
months. The package version is not bumped — the publish-date suffix in
the AMI name (e.g. fck-nat-al2023-hvm-1.4.0-20260801-arm64-ebs) is the
field that changes between refreshes.
If you pin AMIs by name pattern with most_recent = true, you will
transparently graduate to the freshly-published AMI on the next deploy.
If you pin a specific AMI ID, you will need to bump the ID manually
when it is deprecated by AWS.
What gets refreshed, what doesn't
| Version line | Refreshed periodically? | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Latest released minor (e.g. v1.4.x) | Yes, every 6 months | Both fck-nat and fck-nat-nat64 flavors, both arm64 and x86_64 |
| Older minor versions (v1.3.x, v1.2.x, …) | No | Remain available until AWS auto-deprecates them at 2 years from their original publish date |
If you need a version that has been deprecated by AWS, set
include_deprecated = true on your data source and pin the specific
AMI ID.
Tag-driven releases
When a new release tag is published on GitHub, the corresponding AMIs are built and published automatically. This replaces the previous manual release process.
Future work
A follow-up will introduce explicit deprecation of AMIs older than 12
months (calling aws ec2 enable-image-deprecation on prior cohorts so
that consumers using most_recent = true graduate to the freshest
publish). Tracked in issue #107.